The Brooklyn Rail

The literal meaning of the Afrikaans word apartheid is “separateness.” This was the guiding principle of the white supremacist regime that dominated South Africa from 1948 to the 1990s, according to which strict structural segregation between “White,” “Bantu” (Black), and “Coloured” South Africans was imposed through forced relocation and control of movement. It was under this system that photographer David Goldblatt, currently the subject of an extensive retrospective at the Yale University Art Gallery, grew up and came to maturity as an artist. His sympathetic portraits and scenes of everyday life expose the very idea of such “separateness” as a self-serving delusion, one reliant on the fiction that clear categories exist and firm boundaries can be maintained—whether between self and other, between one social group and its neighbors, or between one patch of land and the next.

As much as Goldblatt’s work reveals the cracks in apartheid’s supposedly rational and structured racial order, so too did his own social position and background. As a white man, Goldblatt enjoyed legally-enforced privileges that were denied to Black, Asian, and multiracial South Africans. But as the grandson of Jewish immigrants who fled Lithuania to escape persecution, he was acutely aware that his status was at best provisional under an Afrikaner nationalism closely linked with Nazi sympathizers and even the Nazi party itself. He knew that he lived in “a police state, a fascist state, an anti-Semitic state, and of course a racist state.”¹ This knowledge is never far from the surface of his photographs, despite the fact that they avoid the dramatic protests and clashes with police most immediately associated with South African photography during apartheid.

No Ulterior Motive is divided into seven sections organized loosely by topic rather than chronology, but as a visitor moves through the Yale University Art Gallery’s circuitous exhibition space, these categories bleed into each other. Not only are black-and-white photographs from the apartheid era and more recent color images intermixed throughout, the boundaries between one group of works and the next are made porous in ways that often feel intentional. There is one conspicuous exception: upon entering the show, a small room is tucked away to the left, entirely separate from the rest of the exhibition. This gallery contains a group of works gathered under the rubric “Near/Far” that focuses specifically on the dispossession and relocation of Black and Indian South Africans to create spaces reserved for whites. As is typical of Goldblatt’s work, the slippages take center stage in photographs that document the inevitability of continued contact between supposedly separate racial groups, such as The son of an ostrich farmer waits with a labourer for the day’s work to begin, near Oudtshoorn, Cape Province (Western Cape) (1966). It is both telling and appropriate that this examination of apartheid’s attempt—and failure—to impose a specifically spatial register of “separateness” is itself kept distant from the flexible and continuous flow that characterizes the rest of the show. The spatial organization of the exhibition itself is as thematically pointed as the works it contains.

The main body of No Ulterior Motive, however, kicks off with two closely intertwined sections presented together in a large U-shaped gallery space: “Informality” and “Working People.” These two subjects—the ad hoc methods used to subtly resist or circumvent structures of oppression and the working conditions imposed by apartheid regulation—need to be seen together, because working around the system was the only way many could find work at all. The diptych Wait-a-Minute photographer (1955), which shows a photographer’s improvised outdoor setup and his stylishly dressed client, makes the point explicit. Finding a way to ply your trade or an opportunity to pose in your best suit are the small victories that allow life to continue in and around persecution or institutional cruelty.

Another example of the inherent humanity of day-to-day resistance is found in an image (a rare large-scale color photograph taken during the apartheid years) showing a family in bed comfortably reading the newspaper together: Sunday morning: a not-white family living illegally in the “White” group area of Hillbrow, Johannesburg (1978). The “Working People” section also includes photographs drawn from one of Goldblatt’s most potent projects, “The Transported of KwaNdebele.” For this series of images Goldblatt accompanied workers on their daily bus commute to Pretoria from the remote Bantustan (or Black “homeland”) where they had been relocated under apartheid policy. Leaving as early as 2:45 a.m., some would not return home until 10 p.m. that night. Goldblatt’s tenebrous and deeply empathetic photographs of this “South African Odyssey” expose the everyday brutality that undergirded apartheid’s rhetoric of self-determination and “separate development.”

Between these works and the final three groups of Goldblatt’s photographs lies a narrower, hallway-like gallery containing the section “Dialogues,” which features the work of other South African photographers. Conspicuous among them is Ernest Cole, a Black contemporary of Goldblatt who worked in a similar mode but was forced by police pressure to flee the country in 1966. Here is a stark reminder of the leeway that Goldblatt’s legal status as a white man afforded him under apartheid. Zanele Muholi’s frank and direct images of Black queer, transgender, and intersex people—including Muholi themself—stand out too, an incisive statement of the fact that everyday life and the simple act of existence continue to carry pointed political meanings for those who are institutionally stigmatized and regularly threatened with violence, even after apartheid.

Coming back to Goldblatt’s work, we are struck dumb with “Disbelief” in a group of photographs showcasing what you might call the administrative surreal—or sublime. Here is an empty veld bisected by a single lonely fence. Here are the markers separating two indistinguishable, but racially segregated, sections of beach. Here is a stalled development, half-finished, roofless houses receding into infinity. But here too is Saturday morning at the hypermarket: Semi-final of the Miss Lovely Legs competition, 28 June 1980 (1980, printed later) and other scenes of suburban Afrikaner life whose aggressive normality is heightened to a kind of delirium by our knowledge of the larger system that sustains it. Some of the most arresting images included here show buildings of the Dutch Reformed Church, which until the mid-eighties supported apartheid. These are towering, monumental edifices, become “fortresslike,” as the exhibition didactics tell us, in response to the perceived threat of the anti-apartheid movement. Such photographs contrast powerfully with a group of images further on in the final section, “Assembly,” that highlight the activities of more liberal religious groups, such as Methodists meet to find ways of reducing the racial, cultural and class barriers that divide them, 3 July 1980 (1980) or The Apostolic Multiracial Church in Zion of SA Crossroads, Cape Town. 11 October, 1984 (1984). These works provide a much more human and impromptu vision of South African religiosity.

Between “Disbelief” and “Assembly” is sandwiched “Extraction,” a second take on Goldblatt’s interest in work and labor, but here focused closely on mining operations. The artist was born in Randfontein, a mining town, and some of his earliest projects were carried out while employed as a photographer in the mining industry. This body of work contains some of the exhibition’s most engaging portraits, as we get to know both the primarily Black laborers and the white supervisors who inhabit this stygian world of heavy machinery, unearthed gold, and carcinogenic asbestos waste. “Boss Boy” detail, Battery Reef, Randfontein Estates Gold Mine (1966), is particularly interesting, as contrary to Goldblatt’s usual practice it crops out its subject’s face, focusing only on his body and the tools of his trade. Some of the images here are also among the show’s most formally ambitious, at times resembling Constructivist experiments or approaching geometric abstraction.

But the exhibition closes on one of Goldblatt’s most characteristic themes: solidarity. “Assembly” highlights the everyday circumstances that bring people together, including weddings, funerals, religious services, and impromptu dance parties. Some of the post-apartheid images go so far as to show rallies or protests, subjects the artist typically avoided. Two especially poignant photographs show, on the one hand, South Africa’s Constitutional Assembly after they adopted the country’s non-racial and democratic constitution in 1996, and, on the other, Johannesburg’s Freedom Square, the site where in 1955 three thousand people opposed to apartheid gathered to adopt the Freedom Charter that forty years later would serve as the basis of the new constitution. In a brutal twist of irony, when the second photograph was taken in 2003, nothing remained to mark the site. We observe only a few figures sheltering from the sun beneath umbrellas and shanties, an expanse of packed dirt, and the city beyond stretching to the horizon.

Although Goldblatt’s work is both humane and humanist, it pulls no punches. The great lesson of his photographs is that even in the face of the most seemingly intolerable circumstances, ordinary life can, must, and will go on—both its triumph and its tragedy.