KABINETT: David Goldblatt and Ernest Cole
For its first-ever Kabinett participation at Art Basel, Goodman Gallery presents two of South Africa’s most significant contemporary photographers: David Goldblatt and Ernest Cole. The work on show offers insight into Goldblatt and Cole’s astute and distinct approaches to photography within the context of a shared pull to document apartheid South Africa.
While Goldblatt and Cole adopted very different techniques, both captured life in the country’s highveld area of Johannesburg, Pretoria and Soweto. Within that geography, however, each photographer accessed areas that would have proven difficult for the other to have entered by virtue of the strict segregation laws enforced at the time.
Cole was one of South Africa’s first black photojournalists. Largely self-taught, Cole trained himself to raise the camera to his eye and swiftly shoot photographs before concealing the apparatus under his clothing. He was even known on occasion to conceal his camera within a punctured brown paper lunch bag or hollowed-out loaf of bread. Using these techniques, Cole was able to capture images in environments like mines and hospitals, where such photography was forbidden.
By contrast, almost all of Goldblatt’s photographs were taken with the express permission of his subjects. In this regard, Goldblatt would carefully set up a tripod, composing and focusing the image with his characteristic rigour. In Goldblatt’s own words: “During those years my prime concern was with values – what did we value in South Africa, how did we get to those values and how did we express those values. I was very interested in the events that were taking place in the country as a citizen but as a photographer, I’m not particularly interested, and I wasn’t then, in photographing the moment that something happens. I’m interested in the conditions that give rise to events”.
The presentation at Art Basel Miami represents iconic works from these two masters of contemporary South African photography, who led and documented separate but parallel lives, in a deeply divided country.
Venue
Miami Beach Convention Center
1901 Convention Center Drive
Miami Beach, FL 33139
Opening Hours
Meridians Opening (by invitation only)
Tuesday, December 3 2019
4pm to 7pm
Private Day (by invitation only)
Wednesday, December 4 2019
11am to 8pm
Vernissage (by invitation only)
Thursday, December 5 2019
11am to 3pm
Public Days
Thursday, December 5 2019
3pm to 8pm
Friday, December 6 2019
12 noon to 8pm
Saturday, December 7 2019
12 noon to 8pm
Sunday, December 8, 2019
12 noon to 6pm