Jo Ractliffe: Under a State of Emergency

“Ractliffe’s work, whether consciously or not, emerges at a time when the impossibility of representing experience started to gain purchase in discussions around the medium’s shortfalls.”

David Goldblatt: “Particulars” (1975)

“I seem to have an innate propensity which has been fed by life experiences and heightened by the kind of hyper-awareness that photography sometimes enables and demands…”   “My first awareness of a bodily particular that I can recall was of the bulges made by the flattened flesh of my inner thighs as I sat […]

Apartheid, White Society and Photography – David Goldblatt is Interviewed at Arles (2006)

Farmer’s Son with his Nursemaid. Marico Bushveld, December 1964, 1964 “During the years of apartheid, I was concerned with trying to…with exploring why people valued this peculiar and evil system and how they expressed those values in their homes, in themselves, in their bodies, in the things that they built.” Interview conducted by Laetitia Martinez, […]

Pieter Hugo in Conversation (2007)

Pieter Hugo in Conversation with Joanna Lehan (21 February 2007), Published in Messina/Musina, Punctum Editions, 2007 JL: Musina is the northernmost town in South Africa. Its name has been changed, and this fact is highlighted in the overarching title of your project, Messina/Musina. What is its significance? PH: Musina is situated just south of the […]

Peter Magubane – Rhodes University Ceremony (2006)

Public Orator: Paul Walters Rhodes University Graduation ceremony, Grahamstown, 7 April 2006 Mr. Chancellor, I have the honour to present to you Dr Peter Magubane for the award of the degree of Doctor of Laws, honoris causa. The distinguished novelist Joseph Conrad wrote in a famous preface: “My task which I am trying to achieve […]

David Goldblatt – Afrikaners Photographed and Revisited (1975-2006)

“The ideology and apparatus of apartheid and the overwhelming power of the state to crush opposition became ever more present in our lives.”   Some Afrikaners Photographed, 1975 – Some Afrikaners Revisited, 2006 By David Goldblatt, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2006 I was born and grew up in Randfontein, a gold-mining town 40 kilometres west of […]