David Goldblatt

Life and work

The story behind the role.

Writer and academic known for global histories of football and the Olympic Games.

David Goldblatt HonFRPS (29 November 1930 – 25 June 2018) was a South African documentary photographer noted for his dedicated portrayal of the South African peoples within the political landscape of the apartheid era. After apartheid's end, he concentrated more on the country's landscapes. Goldblatt's body of work was distinct from that of other anti-apartheid artists in that he photographed issues that went beyond the violent events of apartheid and reflected the conditions that led up to them. His forms of protest have a subtlety that traditional documentary photographs may lack; Goldblatt said, "[M]y dispassion was an attitude in which I tried to avoid easy judgments.... This resulted in a photography that appeared to be disengaged and apolitical, but which was in fact the opposite." Goldblatt also wrote journal articles and books on aesthetics, architecture, and structural analysis.

Encyclopaedic excerpts from David Goldblatt; shortened for length and available under CC BY-SA 4.0.