takes the audience at Design Indaba Conference 2014 on a moving journey through 20 images dating from as far back as 1964 and ending with a photo taken less than a week before his presentation.
Many of the images are portraits, unrelated to each other but through which Goldblatt weaves a common narrative of the complex nature and identity of people, and the conflicted history of South Africa.
The first image he shares is of a commando of National Party stalwarts, which escorted Prime Minister and National Party leader Hendrik Verwoerd and his wife, Betsie, to the party's 50th anniversary celebrations at De Wildt in the old Transvaal. The photo was taken in October 1964 and shows, among others, Leon Wessels, who went on to become a Deputy Minister of Justice in the National Party cabinet.
"A lot of the photographs that I am going to talk about have what we in Afrikaans call ''n ingewikkelde kwaliteit' or a kind of involuted complexity," Goldblatt says.
Wessels, who appears in the middle of the commando photograph, was the first senior Nationalist to apologise for Apartheid and today works as a human rights lawyer.
"So the obvious, is not necessarily the obvious," he muses.
Next is a photo, reminiscent of the work of Dorothea Lange, of a farmer who sits with "great delicacy" smoking a pipe on the threshold of a house in Die Hel, a remote farming community in the Gamkaskloof. Goldblatt notes he found it curious that almost none of the largely white farming community living here had heard of the racist epithet "kaffir" so commonly used during the Apartheid era.
He then shows a portrait of Steven le Roux, a sheep farmer in the Koffiefontein area of the Free State by day, and writer of highly acclaimed Afrikaans novels (including one banned during Apartheid) under the name of Etienne Leroux by night.
In the 1960s Goldblatt photographed the gold mines of the Witwatersrand and its miners. With the permission of the AngloGold mining corporation he visited one of its big hostels, Western Deep Level.
"When I arrived, to my shock, the compound manager had instructed every tribal group in the compound to present themselves to me in tribal attire," he says. "I was about to pack up my things and go back home - I did not want to make ethnographic photos - when I saw that the men actually took this very seriously. That they presented themselves to me with great dignity."
He shares a mining portrait of a so-called "Boss Boy" or team leader, the highest rank that a black man could rise to in the mining industry then. The photo was taken at Randfontein Estates, Goldblatt's hometown, of a man who shows all the paraphernalia of the position.
Next is a portrait of Margaret Mcingana, who later became famous as the singer Margaret Singana, taken in her house in Zola, Soweto. She is reclining on a bed againt the backdrop of a vast, marked wall. The photo heralded the start of a series on Soweto.
"The photograph was taken as an attempt at an essay on Soweto in the early 1970s. I had suggested to the editor of Optima magazine that they do the essay. At that time this vast complex of townships was hardly know to South Africans, in particular to white South African."
Goldblatt suggested that fellow photographer Peter Magubane should do the assignment but he was taken in to solitary confinement and banished so he, accompanied by poet and friend Sipho Sepamla, went to Soweto to shoot the essay.
"This was the first photograph that I did there and it became for me a kind of icon of the township, because the township was a very strange place. It was not a slum. People think it was a slum; it wasn't a slum. It was a vast series of government-built houses. And these houses were designed …
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