E-mail us a comment on this writer. (Comments may be edited and used on this website.) About the author David Goldblatt was born in 1930 in Randfontein, the youngest of Eli Goldblatt and Olga Light’s three sons. He became interested in photography while at Krugersdorp High School. While taking a BCom degree, his interest in photography grew and he dreamed of becoming a magazine photographer. As a young man, he admired and pored over the images in magazines such as Life, Look and Picture Post. In 1963 he decided to devote all his time to photography. Gradually he concluded that his photographs would not suit headline journalism, as he was more interested in the critical observation of the conditions of the society he lived in than in illustrating news events. His photographs are concise but not self-explanatory, hence the precise style of his captions. About his work David Goldblatt’s work has been exhibited in Europe, the United States, Australia and South Africa. His images can be found in the collections of the South African National Gallery in Cape Town, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona. He is the author of:    •   On The Mines (with Nadine Gordimer). Cape Town: Struik, 1973.    •   Some Afrikaners Photographed. Johannesburg: Murray Crawford, 1975.    •   Cape Dutch Homesteads (with Margaret Courtney-Clark and John Kench). Cape Town: Struik, 1981.    •   In Boksburg. Cape Town: Gallery Press, 1982.    •   Lifetimes: Under Apartheid (with Nadine Gordimer). New York: Knopf, 1986.    •   The Transported of KwaNdebele (with Brenda Goldblatt and Phillip van Niekerk). New York: Aperture, 1989.    •   South Africa: The Structure of Things Then. Cape Town and New York: Oxford University Press and Monacelli Press, 1998.    •   David Goldblatt 55. London: Phaidon Press, 2001.    •   David Goldblatt. Fifty-One Years. Barcelona: MACBA and Actar, 2001.    •   Particulars. Johannesburg: Goodman Gallery Editions, 2003 (Awarded the Arles Book Prize for 2004).    •   David Goldblatt. Intersections. Munich: Prestel, 2005.    •   David Goldblatt Photographs. Rome: Contrasto, 2006.    •   Some Afrikaners Revisited. Cape Town: Umuzi, 2007 Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography In 2006 David Goldblatt was presented with this prestigious award in Sweden, the 26th recipient since its inception in 1980. From the Hasselblad press release: David Goldblatt’s work is a life long observation of the social and political developments within South African society. He has been concerned to explore the relationship between individual subjects and the structures within which they live. His interest in the violent history of his country, and his awareness of the symbolic significance of architecture, form an extraordinary statement both personal and socio-political. Photography, in the words of David Goldblatt, reveals “something of the subtlety and ambiguity of our shifting and frequently contradictory perceptions of reality”. The reason why the jury has chosen Golblatt for the Hasselblad award is because Goldblatt’s photographs are acute in historical and political perception. They provide a sense of the texture of daily life, and an important piece of missing information regarding life under apartheid in South Africa. Read the full text home   writers   books   contact   buy   rights all content © Umuzi, Random House Struik this website designed and maintained by Guanaco.co.za