Paris: David Goldblatt

The imposing steps of what looks to be a large municipal building bear the poignant message of the South African women who marched on Pretoria in 1956 against the law requiring them to carry a “pass.” The memorial of his futile march opened in 2006. This is the image that opens the exhibition of South African photographer David Goldblatt, Structures of Dominion and Democracy, at the Marian Goodman gallery in Paris. 

David Goldblatt, 84, a major photographer and the great chronicler of South Africa, has always found the links between people and places of memory, life and work: those uprooted by Apartheid after the Group Areas Act, black workers in vast South African mines, merchants in their shops, the white population at home, the great bourgeois villas, the impoverished interiors of Soweto homes, criminals in the places they committed their crimes. 

Through these 25 photographs, we see buildings, structures, and their impact on the country’s collective memory. The places, landscapes and monuments are symbols of South African society, at once complex and dynamic, bearing the traces of history.