Against the Grain | Photography from South Africa and the United States
Goodman Gallery is pleased to present Against the Grain, an exhibition of photographic works by Ernest Cole, David Goldblatt, Ruth Motau, Ming Smith and Lindokuhle Sobekwa. Across three generations, the exhibition explores how each photographer has used the medium to expose, question and reflect on their social and political contexts. From the 1960s to the present, the works convey an explicitly South African narrative, whilst revealing some historical parallels with the United States. From the segregation and disenfranchisement laws of Apartheid to the era emerging from the liberation struggle and US civil rights movement, the exhibition is framed by Black life under those conditions. Often working against the grain of dominant culture, the photographers demonstrate varying degrees of resistance.
House of Bondage, Ernest Cole’s iconic photo essay, was the first book to visually expose the extreme injustices of the Apartheid regime. First published in 1967, the book documents the daily experience of Black citizens during a period dominated by racial inequality and trauma. It was a courageous attempt to seek help from the global community, setting a precedent over time for future South African photojournalists. Making himself invisible as a photographer, Cole concealed his identity and camera to place himself at the centre of oppressive social structures: passbook arrests, destitute hospitals and schools, spaces of servitude, mining compounds and more. In his words, “three-hundred years of white supremacy in South Africa has placed us in bondage, stripped us of our dignity, robbed us of our self-esteem and surrounded us with hate.”
Concurrently, David Goldblatt was engaged in the implicit conditions of South African society – the values by which people lived – rather than the climactic outcomes of those conditions. Goldblatt says in his last interview, “I was drawn not to the events of the time but to the quiet and commonplace where nothing ‘happened’ and yet all was contained and immanent.” (The Last Interview, Steidl, 2019, Alexandra Dodd). Subtle in his approach, Goldblatt’s photographs uncovered the same pervasive and traumatic realities of South African society – by grouping rare vintage prints by Goldblatt and Cole, the exhibition opens a dialogue between their distinct approaches while offering moments where perspectives coexist.
Artworks
About
David Goldblatt
David Goldblatt (1930 – 2018) was born in Randfontein, a small mining town outside of Johannesburg, South Africa. Through his lens, South African he chronicled the structures, people and landscapes of South Africa from 1948 until his death in June 2018. Well known for his photography which explored both public and private life in South Africa, Goldblatt created a body of powerful images which depicted life during the time of Apartheid. Goldblatt also extensively photographed colonial era monuments and buildings with the idea that the architecture reveals something about the people who built them.
In particular, Goldblatt documented the people, landscapes and industry of the Witwatersrand, the resource-rich area in which he grew up and lived, where the local economy was based chiefly on mining. Equal parts artist and documentarian, Goldblatt was known for his practice of attaching extensive captions to his photographs, which almost always identify the subject, place, and time in which the image was taken. These titles often play a vital role in exposing the visible and invisible forces through which the country’s policies of extreme racism and segregation shaped the dynamics of life, especially along axes of gender, labor, identity, and freedom of movement. Beyond endowing his images with documentary power, Goldblatt’s titles also dignify the people and places he photographs.
In 1989, Goldblatt founded the Market Photography Workshop, a training institution in Johannesburg, for aspiring photographers. In 1998 he was the first South African to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The Goldblatt Archive is held by Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut.
In 2001, a retrospective of his work, ‘David Goldblatt Fifty-One Years’ began a tour of galleries and museums. He was one of the few South African artists to exhibit at Documenta 11 (2002) and Documenta 12 (2007) in Kassel, Germany. A more recent retrospective includes, ‘David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive at the AIC’ (2018), which is now touring. This major traveling retrospective exhibition spans the seven decades of this South African photographer’s career, from the 1950s to the 2010s, demonstrating Goldblatt’s commitment to showing the realities of daily life in his country. The exhibition and accompanying publication bring together roughly 150 works by Goldblatt from the collections of the Yale University Art Gallery and the Art Institute of Chicago—two major Goldblatt repositories—including his early black-and-white photography and his post-apartheid, large-format color photography.
Goldblatt was the recipient of the 2006 Hasselblad award, the 2009 Henri Cartier-Bresson Award, the 2013 ICP Infinity Award and in 2016, he was awarded the Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the Ministry of Culture of France.
Other notable group exhibitions and biennales include: ILLUMInations at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, South Africa in Apartheid and After, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2013); Everything Was Moving: Photography from the 60s and 70s, Barbican Centre, London (2012). He also exhibited at the Jewish Museum (2010); and the New Museum (2009), both in New York.
Selected key collections include: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); Tate Modern, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; The J. Paul Getty; Museum, Los Angeles; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Art Institute of Chicago; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography, Amsterdam; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; The Walther Collection, Neu-Ulm, Germany and New York; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; Johannesburg Art Gallery, South Africa; Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Musée de l’Élysée, Lausanne; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles.
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Lindokuhle Sobekwa
Lindokuhle Sobekwa (b. 1995 in Katlehong, Johannesburg) is a South African photographer. He was introduced to photography in 2012, through the Of Soul and Joy Project in Buhlebuzile High School in Thokoza township, where his photography mentors included Bieke Depoorter, Cyprien Clément-Delmas, Thabiso Sekgala, Tjorven Bruyneel and Kutlwano Moagi.
In 2024, Sobekwa presented solo show at the Johannesburg Art Gallery titled Umkhondo: Going Deeper, following his 2023 FNB Art Prize Award.
In 2023, Sobekwa was awarded the inaugural John Kobal Foundation Fellowship. Maintaining the scrapbook aesthetic of the handmade edition for his first photobook, I carry Her photo with Me, a photographic search for answers about the disappearance of his sister Ziyanda, was published in 2024.
In 2022, he opened his first museum show at Huis Marseille (Amsterdam), featuring the body of work Umkhondo. Tracing Memory, as part of the summer program The Beauty of the World So Heavy. His handmade photobook, I carry Her photo with Me, was included in African Cosmologies at the FotoFest Biennial Houston (2020), curated by Mark Sealy.
In 2021, he completed a residency at A4 Foundation in Cape Town, which culminated in a two-person exhibition with Mikhael Subotzky titled Tell It to the Mountains. He is also currently working on a collaborative project with French Photographer Cyprien Clément-Delmas about the community of Daleside in South Africa. This series was published by Gost in 2021 and has been supported by the Rubis Mécénat Foundation.
Sobekwa’s work has been exhibited in South Africa, Iran, Norway, the US and the Netherlands. His breakout photo series Nyaope: ‘Everything you do my Boss, will do’ was published in the Mail & Guardian (South Africa) in 2014 and his work was featured in Vice magazine and the Standaard in the same year. He completed the foundation course at Market Photo Workshop and in 2017, Sobekwa was selected by the Magnum Foundation as a fellow in the renowned Photography and Social Justice program.
Sobekwa lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.
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