Page 8 - David Goldblatt _ Johannessburg 1948 - 2018

DAVID GOLDBLATT ..... 6
My thoughts roamed. We used to come here as students, my friends and I, five of us crammed into a VW Beetle, with a bottle of Old Brown sherry hidden under the seat. That was thirty years earlier and I couldn’t remember what films we saw. One of my girlfriends wore her pyjamas once, like a child who’d have to be carried home to bed, just to win a dare. And I took part in cycle races here as a schoolboy. If you wanted to do
any hill-climbing in Johannesburg, you had to improvise. When we were tired of racing up Northcliff Hill, we came here to the dump. The gradient was punishing: at the finish line your legs wouldn’t hold you and you simply toppled off the bike onto the grass. Did I admire the view of the city then? It’s spectacular, I thought, looking over David’s shoulder. Johannesburg has an unlikely, hard-won sort of beauty.
David was adept at finding unexpected corners to view the city from – the Braamfontein railway yards, or Moffat Park in the southern suburbs, or the slope of a dump beside the M2 in the southwest. Today the viewpoint was out of reach and a photograph eluded him. After an hour, he decided not to waste a plate and packed everything up.
We drove across the tarmac to the access road. Halfway down, on the northern face of the dump, we stopped and he got out to look back up at the screen. Perhaps something else was itching him. The side of the dump had caved in here, exposing a layer of rubber tyres, which must have been laid down to shore up the shifting sand. Typical Johannesburg: a surface torn to expose the man-made armature, rusty girders supporting a screen, the desaturated blue of the sky.
My presence on this day was justified by the fact that I was doing ‘research’ (the quotation marks are well advised) for my TJ text. My eyes were peeled. I wanted to understand how David worked, what he looked for and how he realized it on film. I’m not sure what found its way into the novel I eventually wrote, where the fictional Saul Auerbach displaced the real man, but this is what I learned about David: sometimes he imagined the photograph and then sought a vantage point from which it might be approximated.
The moment of orientation must be seized, especially in a place where vantage points are precarious. In 2008, Crown Gold Recoveries began recycling the dump, picking at its apparently solid sides with front-end loaders and carrying the sand away to be reprocessed. The photograph David might have taken from the top of the screen had to stay in his head. As far as I know.
Silvertown
Another day, with Thabo Mayemane watching our backs, we drove to Alex.
At some point in the last decades a security barrier had been installed down the middle of Vasco da Gama Street to keep people out of the industrial area of Marlboro South. The locals called it the Berlin Wall. It clearly hadn’t done its job. The cement barrier was still there, but the wire-mesh fence with which it once was topped had long since been sawn off and carted away. ‘Wonderful building material for shacks,’ David said. The rusty stubs of the fence posts now came in useful when people wanted to haul themselves over the barrier and cross the street.
The factories on the Marlboro side of Vasco da Gama looked bombed out. Smoke curled from piles of rubbish and heaps of ash. The Alex side of the street, beyond the barrier, was lined with small businesses and advertising boards. Toby’s Tavern. Brutal Fruit. The Manor of Bryanston. This last was a hoarding for a housing development now doing duty as a gate. Don’t worry carwash. Be happy. R20-R15.
The road dropped down into a valley and rose again
with factories on the left and shacks on the right. We passed
a cemetery spread out on the slopes. I didn’t know it then, but David had photographed the place not long before. Compared to the clutter of shacks across the way, the cemetery looked clean and orderly, almost suburban, with expanses of grass between the tombstones. On the gate into the cemetery was an official-looking sign that said: ‘It’s all happening in Alex.’
‘How was your trip to Cape Town?’ Thabo asked.
‘I enjoyed it very much,’ David said, ‘but I couldn’t wait to get home.’
‘Were you working?’ I asked.
‘I hardly ever take photographs down there. Cape Town is a beautiful place – but I’m not really interested in it. It doesn’t move me. Whereas Johannesburg makes me itch! And I have to scratch it.’
The tar gave way to a rutted track through a patch of veld littered with junk and rubble. On the slope beyond was some newish formal housing – ‘One of the better parts of Alex’ – but we followed the track to a cluster of shacks made of shiny corrugated iron and laid out in regular rows. The place was surrounded by a chain-link fence with a gate that stood open. It reminded me of a roadmakers’ camp.