3rd Nov, 2019 10:00
Modern & Contemporary Art
68
David Goldblatt (South Africa 1930-2018)
Elder of the Dutch Reformed Church walking home with his family after the Sunday service, Carnavon, Cape Province (Northern Cape), January 1968
gelatin silver print
Artwork date: 1968, printed 2006
Signature details: signed and dated in pencil on the reverse
Sold for R170,700
Estimated at R150,000 - R250,000
gelatin silver print
Artwork date: 1968, printed 2006
Signature details: signed and dated in pencil on the reverse
(1)
Another example from the edition is in the permanent collections of Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland and the Pilara Foundation Collection, Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco.
Notes:
A highly controversial body of images at the time of its 1975 first edition photobook debut, the series Some Afrikaners Photographed was and remains an unflinching, dispassionate though not unsympathetic 20th century portrait of a South African community. During his lifetime, David Goldblatt maintained that the project was not intended as nor should it be considered a definitive or essentialised understanding of Afrikaner identity. Instead, “Goldblatt destabilises. He suggests porous definitions.”Though this image from the series (LOT X) stands alone as its own complete, autonomous work, Goldbaltt’s oblique and open-ended strategies shift into focus when juxtaposing this image with another from the series (figure 1). “Here the mirroring of the two images—in the symmetrical posing of the figures, the formal presentation, the repeated father/mother/daughter family group—draws them as much as the caption does into an inescapable alignment and dialogue that is fraught by the fact that one family is white, the other is coloured. Both elders are worthies in the Dutch Reformed Church—though not without qualification. What Goldblatt’s caption does not mention is that the coloured elder would have been the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Sendingkerk, the made-for-non-whites stepchild of the parent church. The coloured leader and his family would not have been allowed to attend services in the church of the white elder.”[2] The strength of this work (and indeed Goldblatt’s larger practice) is the subtlety of his persuasion: decisive conclusions or final pronouncements are left to the discretion of the viewer.
Kathryn Del Boccio
Sources:
[1] Krog, A. (2007). ‘…between the nose and the mouth. Perhaps more towards the eyes’ in Goldblatt, D. (2007). Some Afrikaners Revisited. Johannesburg: Umuzi-Random House, p.33.
[2] Powell, I. (2007). The Anxiety of identity and Some Afrikaners. In Goldblatt, D. (2007). Some Afrikaners Revisited. Johannesburg: Umuzi-Random House, p.20.
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Auction: Modern & Contemporary Art, 3rd Nov, 2019
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