Page 31 - David Goldblatt _ Johannessburg 1948 - 2018

The quiet eloquence of Dreams
The poetry behind David Goldblatt’s eye
It was in late 1975, on one of those soft, smoke infested Soweto mornings that I took a walk with the late Nat Diseko, a journalist with the now-defunct Rand Daily Mail. Like most journalists and photographers in the township, he was quite well known. There was a myth that, to make it to the front pages of a newspaper
– and reach instant stardom – one only had to perform a spectacular feat, anything, that would be caught on camera. On this occasion, a known thug called Bizzah, whose legendary reign of terror around the shops of Orlando East and Phefeni had yet to be immortalised in newspapers, saw us approaching and proceeded to pull out one of the biggest blades I’d seen outside of a butchery. Holding it aloft in a stabbing pose, he said: ‘Hey, Nat, kan jy ‘n kiekie vat vir the papiere – can you take a snapshot for the papers?’
For the longest time, photography had always operated outside of our most immediate preoccupation, “our” being a possessive pronoun for my siblings, as parents belonged to a different species and could not be claimed. Photos or pictures were utilitarian, serving a purpose, to accompany a story –
in the tormented first burst of consciousness, when stories started having a link, however tenuous, to our lives – carried in the newspapers of our times. As a kid, this would be the Daily News, The Mercury or The Sunday Tribune on weekends. I liked the Tribune for the cartoons, Beetle Bailey and Tumbleweeds were my favourites. These were likeable rogues rendered in
full colour, unlike the cartoons of Jock Leyden, which, on the rare occasion they did, depicted black people as smudges with exaggerated lips and bulbous eyes. There was also the Golden City Post, which reported the picaresque adventures of Indian gangsters and racketeers, a mystery for us in Mayville, who took Indians to be singularly peaceful and incapable of criminality.
The pictures – or photographs – in magazines were different, tastefully curated, totally dedicated to chronicling
the lifestyles of white people, for instance Personality, Fair Lady, Farmer’s Weekly and De Huisgenoot. In an essay ‘Nothing
Personal,’ which accompanies photography by Richard Avedon, James Baldwin has this to say about his impressions of his countrymen and women as he saw them on his TV screen.
Blondes and brunettes and, possibly, redheads – my screen was colourless – washing their hair, relentlessly smiling, teeth gleaming like the grillwork of automobiles, breast firmly, chilling, encased – packaged as it were – and brilliantly uplifted, forever, all sagging corrected...
he writes. I’m sure he couldn’t help the sardonic tone but his reflection could easily be transposed to our shores where
a constituency enjoying the highest standard of living on the back of cheap black labour could gouge out of the misery of the majority the kind of leisure that exists only in dreams.
South Africans have since time immemorial been at the mercy of a myth. The perpetrators of the myth, the state that sought to present an unproblematic Eden could not maintain
it for the simple reason that it is in the nature of myths to be exploded. The arts played a huge role in exposing the lie and
in conscientising the deluded children of the liars. In essence, what has changed the picture and exposed the hidden hand has been the courage of a few men and women – people who would have benefitted from a continued maintenance of the myth – which brings us to the hidden poetry of David Goldblatt.
Most of the images, whether of a black woman looking at the camera, through a young white woman sitting on a stoep
in Hillbrow to a white baby with child minders and a dog in Alexander Street Park, Hillbrow, have little or no movement
at all. They are as still in conformity with the gazes of most of the subjects. Where there is movement, such as Anna Lebako ambling along, carrying the week’s laundry to a white suburban family, is counterpointed by a man running in the opposite direction. It is this immobility or economy of movement, which gives the images their strength, a brooding aura.
Even the buildings evince this air of expectancy, of something ineffable waiting to break out in the horizon. It’s not far to surmise that this aura is implicated by the period in which these images were taken, at the cusp of something strangling about to break open in our country.
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