David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive
Yale University Art Gallery
New Haven
Through June 22
It’s a portrait of action and fun, as if the kids were already laughing in the street and the photographer told them to look up for just a second. It’s also startling in its intimacy. The camera is so close, the kids so unaffected even as they’re posing. Look closer, too, and it’s not all joy. The kid on the ground isn’t smiling. Why is one of the other kids holding up a ball?
And yes, though it’s Black and White kids in the same picture, and everyone seems fine being there, they’re not exactly playing together.
Photographer David Goldblatt “captured this energetic scene during his initial foray into photography just after high school,” in 1949, an accompanying note explains. “The spontaneous interaction of children of different races on a city street clashed with the country’s politics at midcentury.” The South African government had just instituted apartheid the year before Goldblatt took the photo, and “subsequently allocated the neighborhoods of Fietas (known officially as Pageview) and Mayfair for White residents only, enforcing segregation by fines and compulsory resettlement.” There’s a huge story behind the smaller one. But the photograph reminds us that you don’t get the huge story without the smaller ones.
The photo is part of “David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive,” an arresting, moving, and thought-provoking show that has its final weekend at Yale University Art Gallery.
Goldblatt, who was born in 1930 and died in 2018, “first took up the camera in 1948, the same year the policy of apartheid (‘separateness’) was introduced” in South Africa.” Over the next seven decades, he assiduously photographed the country’s working classes, landscapes, and built environment while forging connections with South African photographers from different backgrounds and generations.” Across his career, “he scrupulously examined the history and politics of South Africa, where he witnessed the rise of apartheid, its divisive and brutal policies, and its eventual demise. His sensitive photographs offer a view of daily life under the discriminatory system and in its complex aftermath.”
Goldblatt wasn’t a firebrand. He “was drawn, in his own words, ‘to the quiet and commonplace, where nothing “happened” and yet all was contained and immanent.’ Accompanied by precise captions, his images expose the everyday manifestations of racism and point to centuries of Black dispossession — economic, social, and political — under colonial White rule.”
The name of the show comes from Goldblatt’s taking advantage of “the opportunities presented by commercial photographic assignments to document life in South Africa as honestly and straightforwardly as possible. In the early 1970s, he placed a classified ad seeking portrait sitters: ‘I would like to photograph people in their homes.… No ulterior motive.’ Yet,” the note continues, “his professed impartiality masked a critical perspective toward his country’s people, history, and geography.”
That critical perspective is more complex than even the accompanying note suggests. One effect Goldblatt achieves in turning his lens to “the quiet and commonplace” is to avoid all major political figures or obvious signifiers to Americans that would connote where the images are from. There are no portraits of Nelson Mandela or Steve Biko, no images of F.W. de Klerk or Thabo Mbeki, no vistas even of Table Mountain in Cape Town. Instead there are street scenes, group photos, action shots: a miner in his hard hat at the end of a shift, an egg-and-spoon race in a field, a wedding party in Soweto, dancers at a railway station.
Sometimes the captions do the heavy lifting. Goldblatt photographed a man and a girl in a convenience store. He titled it Ozzie Docrat with his daughter Nassima in his shop before its destruction under the Group Areas Act, Fietas, Johannesburg. You would never know this from the shop’s orderly appearance or their smiling faces. In another image, a group of people are gathered around a statue hanging from a crane. Whether the statue is being put up or taken down is unclear until you read the caption: The dethroning of Cecil John Rhodes, after the throwing of human feces on the statue and the agreement of the university to the demands of students for its removal, University of Cape Town, 9 April 2015. Other times, Goldblatt knows when the picture tells almost all the story, as in Playground, Chiawelo, Soweto, September 1972.
Over the course of his career, he photographed people whose neighborhoods had been razed under apartheid and the people who supported that razing, a robber waiting for his next victim, a vendor selling food at a construction site, a group of nomadic sheep shearers, shoppers at a mall, participants in a beauty pageant, people working in a funeral parlor. He took pictures of industrial workers, a man mowing his lawn, a man and a woman exchanging a glance as she walks by. In each of the dozens of images in the show, he does what so many of the best photographers have done: He gives each of his subjects their dignity and humanity, lets us see them as individuals. In that, it’s easy to understand the sincerity in Goldblatt’s promise of having no ulterior motive.
True objectivity is, of course, impossible. Subjectivity begins with the decision of where to point the camera, what to take pictures of and what not to, and proceeds with the decisions of which shots of people to use. Goldblatt’s photographs also show that when a place is under stress, it’s hard not to document that; turning away from it to focus on something “apolitical” would have been its own subjective decision.
Goldblatt’s relentless push toward specificity, the details of the situation he finds himself in, means that he documents how complex the situation in South Africa was throughout his life. The overtly racist policies of apartheid and their legacies shaped the country for his entire life, but within that, there were innumerable other forces, between rich and poor (and some poor White people), between rural and urban, between old and young. There were stalwart activists and rank opportunists, people who were near saints and others that were criminals, and through it all, a lot of people just trying to get by. Goldblatt’s photographs help us understand how, even when his country experienced one of the most sweeping political changes of the 20th century, some things remained stubbornly in place, and some problems turned out to be more deeply rooted than laws and presidents could reach.
There’s a lesson in there for us, as the United States now finds itself under stress. Our government is testing the limits of its power, and increasingly people are pushing back and protesting. Political violence is on the rise. A lot of us are on edge. In all of it, the narrative is focused on one man, the president. But he didn’t come out of nowhere, and the grievances and prejudices he tapped into were around long before he considered a run for office. When he’s gone, they will persist, and for us, addressing them for real will require a hard look not just at the White House, but at one another.
“David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive” finishes its run on June 22 at Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel St. Visit the museum’s website for hours and more information.
