The Apartheid - Everyday life

Each photograph shown of David Goldblatt has an old country quality of a film camera, allowing each photograph an implication of significance, or meaning yet each attempts to represent or clearly document quotidian events of different peoples lives in South Africa. The photos are very similar in this conceptual sense as well a stylistically all being in black and white and having no more that three people. Each picture has a soft simple setting which draws attention to the people in the frame. Over exposure and high contrast echo the content of his pictures, the mixing of races, or as Goldblatt may see it, the divisions between races.
The photos are all taken during the enforcement of Apartheid which was from the end of World War II in 1948 until 1994. Each picture successfully represents and portrays life as it is. The blank almost haunting expressions on the faces of the plot holder and the daughter of a servant is compositionally divisive and each person has a separate connection with Goldblatt and none amongst themselves. The portraiture style is old, taking photographic qualities of the late 19th century of a flat, frontal angle, subjects staring straight into the camera, and a grainy, antique quality that was old for its time even in 1962.
The scenes, people, places that they are in, are very different from the work of many of the artists we have seem throughout different presentations in that natural lighting is used. All the pictures are taken at different parts of the day and of different kinds of people: the old landowner, the appearing to be boy scouts of South Africa, a pinic splayed out with assuming a father and his children, a child and his caretaker, and a young girl in her new tutu. The latter of these, the young girl in her tutu, really stands out as different from the rest of the pictures. Compositionally it is very complex: the girl takes a delicate simple pose but is placed amongst a busy background of lines, patterns, shadows, and appears to be lost in the mix of all of it. It is also the only photo of a single person and one of the most recent of the collection of photos. But yet just as the others it is another banal moment capturing a raw quality of simply life as it is, clean and crisp.