Page 10 - David Goldblatt _ Johannessburg 1948 - 2018

DAVID GOLDBLATT ..... 8
Over breakfast one morning a lens popped out of my glasses and fell in my scrambled eggs. David took out a Swiss army knife and put the frame back together again.
In an Italian restaurant that evening he gave me some sound advice: when in doubt, order the veal marsala. They might fuck up the meat, but the sauce will always be good.
Between breakfast and dinner, we visited the CCA and were shown around their astonishing photographic archive. After a tour of the cold storage rooms, we went on to the library.
David’s wish list had been catered for in advance and various boxes and portfolios stood ready on a long wooden table. We spent some time looking at images by Édouard Baldus and Henri Le Secq, two of the Missions Heliographiques photographers who documented the architecture of France in the 1850s. Then we looked at Louis de Clercq’s photographs of crusader fortifications in Syria and Asia Minor, also from the first decades of photography. David was dissatisfied. ‘You can see the weaknesses in these. It shows you how good the Bissons are. Head and shoulders above the others.’
While the archive assistants were setting out the images by Bisson Frères, he told me how the brothers had hauled heavy equipment and fragile glass negatives in horse-drawn carts over rough terrain, or had everything carried up mountain paths by porters to get their shots. David was a better- equipped adventurer, but the affinity was obvious. I could picture him hauling his laden backpack up the screen at the Top Star drive-in.
He went from one image to another, bending down to the loupe, talking half to himself and half to us about the process, about paper negatives and contact prints, and then he stepped back and fell silent. On the table was an architectural image of ruins. I failed to note the details at the time – I had a notebook and pen in my bag, but no intention of using them – and it was months before I found the image on the internet: ‘The Temple of Saturn and the Temple of Vespasian, Rome, 1860s.’ It shows the ruins of two temples in a corner of the Roman Forum. The better preserved of the two, the Temple of Saturn, consists of no more than eight Ionic columns and a crumbling pediment on a base of marble blocks. The other is an even smaller fragment of a vanished structure. Between the columns there are glimpses of modern buildings at angles in the background, the new and the old jammed together, as always.
I had looked at David’s photographs countless times in his company, but he seldom spoke about them in technical terms. Instead he was always telling me the story behind the image: how he’d met this man or woman, the subject of the photograph, what a remarkable person he was, or what a story she told. He was always rehearsing a caption. But now he started talking about the composition.
‘Just look at these lines,’ he said, sketching the verticals and diagonals with the edges of his hands, showing where they intersected, extending them into the space beyond the frame, our space. ‘This is the only viable photograph of this structure. It’s perfect. Every structure has a logic and once you’ve understood that logic, you’ve found the point of view. It’s almost self-appointed. He has to be standing here. Here.’
In my hotel room that night, when pen and paper had become possible, I made some notes. If it’s true that you might imagine the photograph beforehand and then find a way of approximating it with a camera, it’s also true that the world dictates the terms of any resolution. If you’re attuned to the material world, to the is-ness of things, as David liked to say, the world will show you where to stand. When the imagined and the actual come into alignment, for a moment, you gratefully accept a photograph.
He pored over the photographs. I had never seen him more intent. ‘Look at this black,’ he said. ‘It’s unbelievable.’
I looked at a shadow beside a wall through the loupe. was indeed very black.
It to
‘The detail is incredible,’ he went on. ‘I would struggle do this today using a camera with all the bells and whistles. Yet they did it just a few years after photography had been invented ... with paper negatives!’ These albumen prints were made two decades after the first daguerreotype.