David Goldblatt: Fifty-One Years

David Goldblatt stands as South Africa's most respected and important documentary photographer. His work in his native country has consistently been uncompromising in its critical exploration of South African society, through the aparthied years during the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, and into the more recent post-aparthied period. His body of photographs of the architecture of South Africa make an eloquent statement about the inequalities of life there: a beautiful villa on the sea juxtaposed with a black mother and child sleeping where their now destroyed house once stood; the beautifully detailed, whitewashed stairway of a winery and a man building a tiny house for himself out of cinder-block. This monograph, published on the occasion of a major retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, brings together work from throughout his career, including recent, never-before-published material. Its images of architecture, people, and landscape speak to the social injustice of his world, but also maintain a delicate balance with aesthetic achievement. It also includes essays by prominent South African writers Nadine Gordiner and J.M. Coetzee, and by Okwui Enwezor, curator of the upcoming Documenta XII exhibition.