Evidence of Immanence
David Goldblatt
Curated by George Stolz
In collaboration with Goodman Gallery
Evidence of Immanence presents a small but judicious selection of Goldblatt’s photographs that highlight the renowned photographer’s career-long examination of structures (in an expanded sense of the term) found throughout his native South Africa. Curated by George Stolz, Evidence of Immanence focuses especially on Goldblatt’s particular sensitivity to the charged flux of currents —temporal, cultural, political, historical and even spiritual— contained within such structures, becoming particularly palpable where they reflect the immediate hands, hopes and needs of their makers. At the same time, given Goldblatt’s masterful and exquisite photographic craftsmanship, the photographs become singularly poetic artifacts that themselves can similarly be read as ‘structures.’ As Goldblatt himself wrote about his work, these are images of ‘the quiet and the commonplace where nothing “happened” and yet all was contained and immanent.’
David Goldblatt (Randfontein, South Africa, 1930 — Johannesburg, 2018) documented the harsh complexities of South Africa with a combination of profound intimacy and profound outrage. From the onset his photography was based on protest —informed, passionate, yet never vitriolic or propagandistic— first against South Africa’s oppressive apartheid policies, and later against the post-apartheid conditions that still wreak havoc on the nation’s social fabric. Goldblatt’s photographs, whether of people, places or buildings, are carefully, often beautifully composed, but they are never self-consciously virtuosic. Instead, they possess the muted directness of the commonplace, an ease with emptiness, an affinity for the oblique and the quiet.
Evidence of Immanence is David Golblatt’s fifth solo exhibition at Galería Elba Benítez and is part of PHotoESPAÑA 2024.
