Page 7 - David Goldblatt _ Johannessburg 1948 - 2018

Here
Ivan Vladislavic
Top Star
In 2006, I started spending time with David Goldblatt while he took photographs around Johannesburg. We were working on a joint project, later published as TJ/Double Negative, and he had agreed to let me ride shotgun now and then. The project would combine a selection of his photographs of the city and a new piece of writing from me, but I wasn’t sure yet what form this text would take, and so it wasn’t clear what I hoped to discover by shadowing him while he worked. Some of the time we were accompanied by a more qualified bodyguard, Thabo Mayemane, but when we planned to stay in the safer parts of the city it was just the pair of us. Not that it was easy to say in advance where we would go, as David often followed his nose.
On an afternoon in October, as we drove away from his house in Fellside, he said: ‘Shall we go to the Top Star? I haven’t been that way lately. I want to look at the city from up there.’
The Top Star was a mine dump on the southern edge of town. Its claim to fame was that it was close to the CBD and had a drive-in theatre on top of it. The theatre had closed down recently and a mining company was planning to reprocess the dump for its residual gold. There were reports in the papers that David might have seen.
Over the years I’d taken a few visitors there to show them the view of the city, and I understood the place’s appeal, but on my last visit it had felt neglected and some scavengers picking through the trash had harassed me and my guest. I hadn’t been back for a while. As we headed for the motorway I told David
the story, and he told me about the hazards of lugging cameras around a predatory city. ‘Going to Hillbrow now reminds me of going into Soweto in the seventies,’ he said, ‘except that then I was received more warmly. People were curious but they were friendly. These days they’re openly hostile. I often feel threatened.’
To ease the tension, he said, he sometimes explained to people what he was doing. Thabo disagreed with this strategy because it could come across as naive. He thought the correct approach was just to go in and start doing whatever it was you wanted to do. The message you needed to send was always: I belong here. I’m comfortable. What I’m doing is none of your business.
The road slanting up the side of the dump was open. We passed under the modernist arch of the old ticket booth and drove to the top, weaving around potholes and fallen stones. It was an eerie place, empty and distorted, like a still from a disaster movie about an earthquake: a wavy carpet of cracked grey tar pinned down by rows of metal poles that had once held speakers, a hollowed-out projection house and cafeteria, a white screen against the pale sky. My eye was drawn to
the cafeteria and I almost pointed it out as we roller-coasted sedately over the humps in the 4X4.
He parked under the screen. Just as we climbed out, there was a glassy explosion nearby, almost underfoot. And then another burst, downwind. Drawn warily to the edge of the dump, we looked over and saw a scavenger in blue overalls hurling bottles into a metal bin. He looked up at us and David lifted a hand in greeting. The grass on the slope was dry, and the whole place crackled like tinder, even though it was spring. Perhaps the rains were late that year. The man down below waved back and bent for another bottle.
Once when I asked David how he chose his subject matter, he said it was an itch. Something itched him and he had to scratch it. Now he seemed to be demonstrating the analogy as he walked up and down on the edge. He looked out over the city with a dissatisfied grimace, and then paced away towards the projection house, turned and gazed up at the screen.
The view of the city he was after, he decided, was actually from up there. An iron ladder went all the way to the top, where we thought we could see some sort of catwalk. David pulled the camper in under the screen to measure the gap to the
first rung. I half-expected him to ask me for a leg up and I was relieved when he said, ‘I’ll have to come back with a ladder.’
Around this time, David had been taking a few photographs from the air, hiring a helicopter to dangle him over townhouse complexes and informal settlements. Something must have been drawing him to the bird’s-eye view. But today he stayed on the ground.
We unpacked the equipment from the camper. Well, David unpacked and I watched. He preferred to do this physical work himself, he always explained, it was part of a routine that kept him focused and present, some sort of muscle memory, like the little rituals of place-kickers on a rugby field. Once the camera had been prepared, he stomped up and down on the edge of the dump, trampling the khakibos flat with his boots, setting the tripod up in one place, and then another.
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