Page 12 - David Goldblatt _ Johannessburg 1948 - 2018

DAVID GOLDBLATT ..... 10
EARLY WORK
When I was 17, I was helping in my father’s shop and the shop would close on a Saturday afternoon. I would then hitchhike into Joburg and walk around the city until the next morning, talking to night watchmen and trying to photograph. People would ask me what I was doing and I would say, ‘I’m poeging. I’m walking around the city; I’m learning the city, and trying to take photographs.’ There was the urge to experience reality, which the camera licences – it allows this, but it also demands coherence. You can’t just walk around with a camera and not take photographs if that is what you’ve decided you want to do. So it was an entirely crude, un-thought- through, unstructured process of becoming physically acquainted with my world. I think the way I work now directly descended from that. More sophisticated, more structured, but still fundamentally trying to find those things in reality that trigger that response in me to want to photograph them.
Excerpt from an interview Alexandra Dodd conducted with David Goldblatt, 2018.