It was the time of the ANC’s Defiance of Unjust Laws campaign. Several thousand people had gathered on Bantu Square, near Duncan Village, for what was supposedly a religious meeting for which the magistrate had given permission. Hidden in a house nearby, waiting to address the crowd were ANC leaders. At the last minute, the police, suspecting the true purpose, ordered the crowd to disperse, but opened fire before they could do so. At least nine were killed and many wounded. The crowd became a vengeance-seeking mob into which, taking a familiar shortcut to her church, drove Sister Quinlan. Her car was overturned and set alight. She was killed and perhaps partly cannabilised. Running battles between police, troops and township people continued into the night. It was said that more than two hundred people were killed.
Koko Qebeyi, not born at that time, became an anti-apartheid activist and city councillor and arranged for the erection of this monument to a woman who had devotedly served the community of Duncan Village.
On 9 August 1956 some 20,000 women marched through Pretoria to present a letter to the prime minister, JG Strijdom, objecting to the law under which they were now compelled to carry “passes.” Neither he nor any of the people working under him accepted the document. On 9 August 2006, the 20th anniversary of the March, this memorial to it was unveiled here, in the amphitheatre where the women had gathered. The words are taken from the protest letter 'The Demand of the Women of South Africa for the Withdrawal of Passes for Women and the Repeal of the Pass Laws' which was to have been handed to Strijdom. The monument is not accessible to the public.
This is one of some 75000 names and historic incidents relating to conflicts in South Africa's history, inscribed in the Wall of Names at Freedom Park.
This is one of a number of works commissioned by the university after some Afrikaner men students were alleged to have urinated into the food of some Black workers. It is hoped that this “Sculpture-on-Campus” project would “promote greater understanding, respect and appreciation of cultural differences” among staff and students, and that it would instil a sense of belonging within them.
At about 3 a.m. on 31 May 2001, forty years to the day after the Republic of South Africa was declared, the sculpture of Strijdom’s head fell through its supporting floor into the parking garage below and was smashed. There was no sabotage. Two homeless people sleeping nearby were slightly injured.
‘...the entire coastal belt from Bloubergstrand to Melkbosstrand (a distance of about 13 kilometres) has been proclaimed a white group area’ from The Standard Encylopaedia of Southern Africa (1971
In a city not known for the respect shown to its structures, these sculptures by Andile Maswangelwa, installed in 2008, were pristine in 2014.
House near Phuthaditjhaba. QwaQwa. 1 May 1989 forms part of Goldblatt’s Structures series. Based on the idea that structures reflect the values of the people who build them, this series is a photographic exploration of the ways in which colonial and Apartheid values were expressed in the construction and deconstruction of structural landscapes. The images in this series - taken between 1964 and 1994 - consider the impact of built environments on landscapes and people.
A multi-racial area which effectively became the home of Cape Town’s Coloured people, District Six was declared a group area for Whites by the government in 1966. Despite strong objections by many and disparate people and organisations, the proclamation was enforced. Fifty thousand ‘disqualfied’ people, most of them Coloureds, some of whose families had lived in the District for as long as seven generations, were removed to mass housing beyond the city. Such was the odium attached to this act of government that private developers eschewed the prime city property thus released.
David Goldblatt was born in Randfontein, a small mining town outside of Johannesburg, South Africa. Through his lens, chronicled the people, structures and landscapes of his country from 1948, through the rise of Afrikaner Nationalism, the apartheid regime and into the democratic era - until his death in June, 2018. 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. In general, Goldblatt's subject matter spanned the whole of the country geographically and politically from sweeping landscapes of the Karoo desert to the arduous commutes of migrant black workers, forced to live in racially segregated areas. His broadest series, which spans six decades of photography, examines how South Africans have expressed their values through the structures, physical and ideological, that they have built.
David Goldblatt (1930 -2018, South Africa), through his lens, chronicled the people, structures and landscapes of his country from 1948, through the rise of Afrikaner Nationalism, the apartheid regime and into the democratic era until his death in June, 2018. 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. Art Institute Chicago will present an exhibition spanning Goldblatt’s seven-decade career titled No Ulterior Motive in December 2023.
Goldblatt's subject matter spanned the whole of the country geographically and politically from sweeping landscapes of the Karoo desert to the arduous commutes of migrant black workers, forced to live in racially segregated areas. His broadest series, which spans six decades of photography, examines how South Africans have expressed their values through the structures, physical and ideological, that they have built.
David Goldblatt’s ‘Structures of Dominion and Democracy’ is a long-term photographic project that examines how South Africa’s built environment reflects the ideologies of its successive political regimes. Initiated in the 1980s and developed over several decades, the series documents a wide range of structures – courthouses, mining compounds, schools, homes, churches, and public spaces – each chosen for its connection to systems of power, control, and belief. Goldblatt was interested in how architecture could serve as a material record of social values. By photographing these structures with clarity and restraint, he invited viewers to consider the moral and historical forces embedded within them.
The series is divided into two parts: structures of "dominion," associated with the apartheid regime and its mechanisms of racial control, and those of "democracy," built after 1994, in the wake of South Africa’s transition to constitutional rule. Goldblatt did not present this shift as a clean rupture, but as a complex, ongoing negotiation between past and present. Many of the post-apartheid structures appear provisional, hopeful yet unresolved, while others suggest the persistence of older patterns of inequality. Together, the photographs offer a sober reflection on the relationship between architecture and ideology, and on how the aspirations and contradictions of a society are made visible in its physical forms.
Costing some R160 million, it has a hotel, conference centre, auditorium, galleries, shops, a museum, a plaza with platforms for the display of their wares by informal traders, a conical tower in which the Freedom Charter is displayed. Most of these facilities are largely unused. Neither the people of Kliptown in whose midst it was planted without their consultation, nor the people of greater Soweto, which it adjoins, have taken to it. Most of the informal traders prefer the ground and the sidewalks to the facilities designed for them.
Fearing that tourists might be confused between Freedom Park in Pretoria and this place which was known as Freedom Square, the branding experts have called it instead The Walter Sisulu Square of Dedication. It is a place with which that hero of the Struggle had very little to do. 22 June 2006
“In the 1990s my anger dissipated. Apartheid was no more. There were things to probe and criticise, but the emphasis was different. Lyricism seemed not only permissible but possible. In the late ‘90s I became aware of colour as a particular quality of this place and its light that I wanted to explore. It seemed ‘thin’, yet intense. To achieve prints that would hold these qualities I would need to print in colour in a way that was similar to that which I had developed for my black and white work … Over the generations, the land has shaped us - I say us in the broadest sense, us South Africans. And we have shaped the land. It is almost impossible now to find a pristine landscape. The grass has been grazed to the point of being threadbare, crops come and go, roads traverse, fences divide, and mines penetrate and throw up scabs of their detritus. These and our structures are the marks of our presence. I am drawn by the intimacies of our association with this land.” David Goldblatt
David Goldblatt was born in Randfontein, a small mining town outside of Johannesburg, South Africa. Through his lens, chronicled the people, structures and landscapes of his country from 1948, through the rise of Afrikaner Nationalism, the apartheid regime and into the democratic era - until his death in June, 2018. 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. In general, Goldblatt's subject matter spanned the whole of the country geographically and politically from sweeping landscapes of the Karoo desert to the arduous commutes of migrant black workers, forced to live in racially segregated areas. His broadest series, which spans six decades of photography, examines how South Africans have expressed their values through the structures, physical and ideological, that they have built.
“In the 1990s my anger dissipated. Apartheid was no more. There were things to probe and criticise, but the emphasis was different. Lyricism seemed not only permissible but possible. In the late ‘90s I became aware of colour as a particular quality of this place and its light that I wanted to explore. It seemed ‘thin’, yet intense. To achieve prints that would hold these qualities I would need to print in colour in a way that was similar to that which I had developed for my black and white work … Over the generations, the land has shaped us - I say us in the broadest sense, us South Africans. And we have shaped the land. It is almost impossible now to find a pristine landscape. The grass has been grazed to the point of being threadbare, crops come and go, roads traverse, fences divide, and mines penetrate and throw up scabs of their detritus. These and our structures are the marks of our presence. I am drawn by the intimacies of our association with this land.” David Goldblatt
Goldblatt’s larger series ‘The Transported of KwaNdebele’ looks at the workers of an apartheid tribal homeland, KwaNdebele, which had no industry, very few opportunities for jobs, and was a long way from the nearest industrial- commercial activity of white-controlled Pretoria. Workers from KwaNdebele would catch buses in the very early morning, some as early as 2:45 am, in order to be at their workplaces in Pretoria by 7:00. At the end of the day they would repeat the journey in the other direction, to get home at between 8 and 10 pm. Goldblatt takes us on their bone-jarring journeys through the night, which is a metaphor for their arduous struggle toward freedom itself. In photographs devoid of sentimentality and artifice, the grim determination to survive and overcome emerges in almost heroic terms.
Caption: In this isolated community people would find their water during the long droughts by scooping in from holes dug in the riverbed. In 1966 Marais was the only man there to have put in a pump which sent water to a dam that he built near his house.
Caption: I asked if she would allow me to make a photograph of her. Would i send her a copy? she replied. I said: Yes, in about three months' time. Don't worry, I'll be dead then, she said. The photograph was made on or about 1 January. She died on 7 April.
Goldblatt spent years taking photographs of Johannesburg – of the white areas of the city centre, the comfortable suburbs and the townships on the outskirts of the city.
Goldblatt was engaged in the conditions of society and the values by which people lived, rather than the climactic outcomes of those conditions. He intended to discover and probe these values through the medium of photography.
“Johannesburg is not an easy city to love. From its beginnings as a mining camp in 1886, whites did not want brown and black people living among or near them and over the years pushed them further and further from the city and its white suburbs. Like the city itself my thoughts and feelings about Joburg are fragmented. I can’t easily bring a vision or a coherent bundle of ideas to mind and say, ‘That’s Joburg for me.’ Over the years I have photographed a wide range of subjects, each was almost self-contained, a fragment of a whole that I’ve never quite grasped.”
— David Goldblatt, 2017
David Goldblatt’s ‘Johannesburg’ series includes a group of portraits taken in 1972 that offer a focused and intimate glimpse into the social fabric of the city at the height of apartheid. These photographs, made primarily in the central business district, depict people encountered in public spaces. While often taken with the subject’s awareness, the portraits are quiet and unposed, conveying a sense of mutual regard rather than intrusion. Goldblatt’s interest lay not in documenting spectacle, but in observing the dignity, posture, and presence of individuals moving through a city shaped by division and control.
The 1972 portraits reflect Goldblatt’s broader approach: careful composition, attentiveness to light and form, and a commitment to photographing without judgement. His lens lingers on small details allowing the viewer to consider how people inhabit public space, and how identity is both shaped by and resistant to its surroundings. Set against the rigid racial and spatial hierarchies of apartheid Johannesburg, these portraits are understated yet powerful documents of individuality. They stand as a testament to Goldblatt’s belief in photography as a way of seeing beyond surface divisions.