silver gelatin print on fibre-based paper

Artwork date: 1971, printed in 2008
Signature details: signed on the reverse
Exhibited: Examples from the edition were exhibited in:
Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 'David Goldblatt: Photographs 1948 to 2018’, 19 October 2018 to 3 March 2019.
Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, ‘On Common Ground: David Goldblatt & Peter Magubane’, 28 July to 25 August 2018.
Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg, ‘The Pursuit of Values’, 21 October to 5 December 2015.
Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, ‘Portraits’, 29 October to 10 December 2011.
Literature: Examples from the edition were illustrated in:
Goldblatt, D. (2015). 'The Pursuit of Values'. Johannesburg: Standard Bank Gallery and Goodman Gallery, illustrated in colour on p.84.
Kent, R. & Dodd, A. (2019). 'David Goldblatt: Photographs 1948-2018'. Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, illustrated on p. 198.
Goldblatt, D. & Vladislavic, I. (2010). ‘Double Negative: TJ’, Cape Town: Umuzi., illustrated on p. 198.

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image size: 40 x 40 cm; framed size: 58.5 x 58 x 1.5 cm

Provenance:

Private collection, Cape Town.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

A doyen of South African photography, David Goldblatt produced an unparalleled body of work within the city of Johannesburg, where he lived for 50 years. The artist began hitchhiking from his hometown of Randfontein to Johannesburg when he was just eighteen years old – exploring the city through photographing it. The artist’s first crucial subject, his unceasing images of the metropolitan reveal changes in the city during and post-apartheid and his documentation has become an incomparable archive.

In the early to mid-1970s, over 20 years after first hitchhiking into the city, Goldblatt turned his camera to the Johannesburg neighbourhood of Hillbrow. Hillbrow of the 1970s was a buzzing community: a 1960s building boom ushered in a large number of high rise apartment developments, making the area a white-designated hub for young families and urban elites alike, with offices, cafes, shopping and dense housing all within the bustling city proper. Goldblatt’s images from this time are not documentary street scenes, but rather masterful portrait studies: the city documented through its people. These works are careful and nuanced observations of individuals who are clearly at ease with the photographer and, consequently, are more sitter than subject: autonomous, self-possessed and belonging wholly to the complicated political and cultural moment they inhabit.

The Summit Club in Claim Street, Hillbrow was built in the 1960s and was at the time the tallest building in Hillbrow. Originally a private hotel, there was also a swimming pool in the basement. By the 1990s The Summit Club would become a notorious strip venue and nightclub. It still operates today and is likely Johannesburg’s longest-running nightclub.

COLLECTIONS

The artist is represented in numerous local and international collections, notably, Johannesburg Art Gallery; Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town; Jewish Museum, Cape Town; Art Institute of Chicago; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris; National Museum of Photography, Copenhagen; Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Getty Center, Los Angeles.