Softcover, 280 x 260 mm, 240 pages RRP R395, ISBN 978-1-4152-0025-4 Special limited collector’s edition, cloth bound hardcover with dust jacket, each copy individually numbered and signed by the author. RRP R850, ISBN 978-1-4152-0026-1 Publication date: February 2007, Category: Photography Slide Show Click here to view some of the photographs in Some Afrikaners Revisited. (651 Kb download) Description This is an expanded re-issue of a book of photographs that has acquired almost mythical value since its publication three decades ago. In 1975, David Goldblatt, arguably South Africa’s most respected photographer, finally published Some Afrikaners Photographed, a photo essay put together by him in the 1960s. It caused an outcry among those Afrikaners who were aggrieved at what they considered ridicule with malignant intent. Most of the small print run had to be sold off for a song. Copies of that first run, today considered a major work of photography, are almost impossible to obtain and have become collectors items, sold at up to R6 000. Some Afrikaners Revisited has been released in 2007 into a greatly changed South Africa. David Goldblatt is a revered figure, celebrated for his life-long photographic exploration of the relationship between individual South Africans and the society they live in. The new issue offers not only an additional twenty images from the ’60s that were not included in the original book, but also Goldblatt’s notes on how the books came into being, along with a contextualising essay by Ivor Powell and Antjie Krog’s impressionistic response to the images. The publication of this book is a landmark event in the history of publishing and photography in South Africa. From Some Afrikaners Revisited, page 11 Some Afrikaners Photographed and Some Afrikaners Revisited: notes on how they came to be By David Goldblatt I was born and grew up in Randfontein, a gold-mining town 40 kilometres west of Johannesburg. My grandparents came with their children to South Africa in the 1890s to escape the persecution of Jews, then prevalent in Lithuania. My father owned a men’s clothing store, my mother kept house. I had two brothers, Nick and Dan, ten and eight years older than me. We were middle-class Jewish people and my earliest experiences of social interaction were partly in the Jewish community, partly in the wider town. I can’t say exactly how old I was, but it was at an early age that I first experienced anti-Semitism. I found it incomprehensible. Why would people – Afrikaans-speaking boys my own age – feel a need to express anger or disgust towards me, a slightly-built kid who had done nothing to them? At an early age I also became conscious of injustice. By the standards of the time and place, my parents and brothers were more liberal and less racist than many whites in the town and I grew into their values from the beginning. I don’t remember those values being taught as a set of precepts so much as being imbibed as commonsense decency. My family was not political in an activist sense, but both my parents were well-read and in our house it was forbidden to use racially derogatory terms. The words ‘kaffir’, ‘coon’, ‘wog’, ‘coolie’, much used in the English-speaking white community in which we lived and among whom I was schooled, were not heard in our house. In our vocabulary gentile girls were never ‘shiksas’ and Afrikaners never ‘gataisim’, terms frequently used when Jews in the town spoke with each other. We spoke of Afrikaners. To read on From an article on David Goldblatt’s work by David Beresford of the Guardian Unlimited, on 29 January 2007: The South African photographer David Goldblatt has won the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography, the photographer’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize, with previous winners including the likes of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Ansel Adams. Read the full text I think that our landscape is an essential ingredient in any attempt at understanding not just the Afrikaner but all of us here. We have shaped the land and the land has shaped us. … It became clear that the photographs I was interested in making were a kind of dialogue with my compatriots, to people who were steeped in what I have called ‘the life, ways, obsessions, graces, laws and particulars of this place and people’. - David Goldblatt A gem to have. Each photograph can be interpreted in any number of ways depending on one's own position in relation to it. Meneesha Govender, Daily News This book will not gather dust on your coffee table and may even become a collectors' item. Liezel Searle, Algoa Sun Each photograph has the potential to take hours of your time. Piet van Niekerk, Eastern Province Herald E-mail us a comment on this book. (Comments may be edited and used on this website.) To buy this book www.exclusivebooks.com www.kalahari.net home   writers   books   contact   buy   rights all content © Umuzi, Random House Struik this website designed and maintained by Guanaco.co.za