Archive for the ‘Art’ Category
by Amanda on Sep 14th, 2011
For a launch with a difference, catch Isobel Dixon at the ArtKaroo Gallery in Oudtshoorn where she will launch The Tempest Prognosticator alongside the opening of an exhibition of work by Susqya Williams and Lee Botha, inspired by her latest poetry collection. The launch and opening will take place on Thursday, 15 September, at 6:00 PM and the exhibition will continue at ArtKaroo until 12 October 2011.
If Oudtshoorn is too far to travel, catch Dixon on 23 September at the Open Book Festival in Cape Town or at Love Books in Meville on 27 September.
Event Details: ArtKaroo Gallery
Event Details: Open Book Cape Town
Event Details: Love Books
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Image courtesy ArtKaroo
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by Amanda on Jul 1st, 2011
Jo Ractliffe, author of As Terras do Fim do Mundo, interviews renowned photographer, David Goldblatt about the Fale le Fale Exhibition at the Market Photo Workshop. Goldblatt and Ivan Vladislavic recently won the 2011 Kraszna-Krausz Best Photography Book Award for their joint publication, TJ / Double Negative. The exhibition is on until 29 July 2011:
I’d like to start with your 80th birthday — that Sunday morning when a group of us were summoned to your house at the crack of dawn in an atmosphere of great mystery and suspense. We were piled into a Kombi and driven north to the Shell Ultra City where we had breakfast. Anyone who knows you would smile because it was the obvious place — you are the ultimate long-distance-driving photographer. And you take great pleasure in the idea that every waitress in every Shell Ultra City across the country knows you so well that all you have to do is walk in and ask for “the usual”.
You’re exaggerating. I would never be so presumptuous. There are one or two waitresses who recognise me. And there’s a garage attendant in Kroonstad who, as soon as I drive up, makes himself available. He is David Mokoena and I am David Goldblatt and we greet each other.
And there’s the girl who overtook your truck on the road and flashed a message, “I love your work”, and you ended up going to her wedding.
Yes, although not yet; she’s not married yet.
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Photo courtesy Daylife
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by Amanda on Jun 13th, 2011
Ivan Vladislavice is shortlisted for the 2011 Sunday Times Fiction Prize for his novel Double Negative, which first appeared in a two-volume set with photographer David Goldblatt’s TJ, and has now been published in a stand-alone edition.
The Sunday Times books editor, Tymon Smith, spoke to Vladislavic about his work and collaboration with Goldblatt:
This collaboration took about five years, but was there ever a fixed idea about how things between you and Goldblatt were going to work?
No. I had done some writing for David before, but not of this kind. I had written a couple of short pieces that eventually went into Portrait with Keys; I wrote a sequence of crits which were published in a catalogue called 51 years in 2001. Over the years we began to talk in a vague way about doing something together, but I can’t remember exactly how it came about that we began to talk more seriously. I think it was when David began to put together a book of his Joburg photographs. That was five or six years ago.
Have you always been interested in photography as an art form?
I became interested in photography when I worked at Ravan Press and was involved with Staffrider because social-documentary photography was a strong component of the magazine. Over the years an interest in art photography has developed from going to galleries and looking at art.
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by Amanda on May 25th, 2011
This May, Umuzi brings you David Goldblatt’s TJ, originally released together with Ivan Vladislavic’s novel Double Negative as TJ/Double Negative:
“Johannesburg is a fragmented city. It is not a place of smoothly integrated parts. And it has a name that does not roll easily off the tongue.” So begins David Goldblatt’s introduction to TJ, a book of photographs of Johannesburg: the City of Gold, Chowburg, eGoli, Jozi, Goutini, Duiwel’s Dorp. Commencing in the 1950s, his masterful lens probes, documents and comments on life over six decades in this incomparable African city. Selected form a massive body of work, this superb distillation presents a unique pictorial history of the city. This is the single edition of the book that was first released as part of TJ/Double Negative together with Ivan Vladislavic.
About the author
David Goldblatt was born in 1930 in Randfontein. His work can be found in the collections of the National Gallery in Cape Town, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the prestigious Hasselblad Foundation International Award in 2006.
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by Amanda on May 3rd, 2011
TJ/Double Negative, a work consisting of a collection of photographs by David Goldblatt and a novel by Ivan Vladislavić, won the prestigious Kraszna-Krausz Best Photography Book Award for 2011 at the Sony World Photography Awards at the Odeon on Leicester Square, London, on Wednesday, 27 April 2011.
A special edition volume of David Goldblatt’s images of Johannesburg collected in TJ: Johannesburg photographs 1948-2010 is accompanied by Ivan Vladislavić’s novel Double Negative which details the fragmented experiences of living in that city. The two works together create a dialogue between word and image, balancing both Goldblatt’s rigorous research and Vladislavić’s narrative fiction. The resulting project describes a difficult metropolis scarred by the history of apartheid, symbolic of contemporary South Africa.
TJ/Double Negative, a co-publication with Italian photography publishers Contrasto, was published in South Africa in November 2010 by Umuzi, an imprint of Random House Struik.
Judges Mary McCartney (Chair), David Campany and Yuka Yamaji comment:
“Goldblatt and Vladislaviċ’s ambitious project explores the relationship between text and image. A highly effective pairing of fiction and photography, this innovative collaboration redefines the possibilities for writing on and about photography.”
Random House Struik Managing Director Stephen Johnson comments:
“We are thrilled with this accolade for a unique publication by two of South Africa’s most original creative talents and delighted that their work is honoured on the international stage in this way.”
Umuzi Publisher Frederik de Jager comments:
“David Goldblatt and Ivan Vladislavić are creative forces of the first order and we at Umuzi are proud of our strong association with both. Goldblatt adds this award to a large number of international tributes he has already received, while it is encouraging that Vladislavić is beginning to receive the international recognition he so richly deserves.”
The award event formed part of the World Photography Festival and Exhibition held in London from 26 April to 22 May. Other awards made were: Best Moving Image Book to Matthew Solomon for Disappearing Tricks: silent film, Houdini, and the new magic of the 20th century, and Outstanding Contribution to Publishing to Gerhard Steidl.
David Goldblatt has worked as a photographer since 1963. Through his images he has carried out one of the most accurate analyses of the changes in South African society, before and after apartheid. His work has been shown in the world’s most important museums and is part of some of the most important collections. He has published sixteen photobooks and received many awards, including the Camera Austria Prize (1995), the Arles Book Prize (2004), the Hasselblad Award (2006) and the Grand Prix International Henri Cartier-Bresson (2009).
Ivan Vladislaviċ is one of South Africa’s most prominent writers. Among his novels are The Folly, The Restless Supermarket and The Exploded View. He has edited and curated a number of art and architecture books. In 2010, Vladislavic’s first short novels were collected and republished in Flashback Hotel. He has received numerous and important awards such as the Sunday Times Fiction Prize, the University of Johannesburg Prize, the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award.
The Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards celebrates excellence in photography and moving image publishing. They were founded in 1985 by the prolific Hungarian publisher and founder of Focal Press, Andor Kraszna-Krausz. Two separate prizes are awarded for photography books and for moving image books (including film and television) published in the UK between 1 January and 31 December 2010. The judging panels of the 2011 Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards are chaired by Mary McCartney (photography) and Hugh Hudson (moving image). The awards are made to works which make a significant contribution to photographic and/or moving image scholarship, history, research, criticism, science and conservation. www.kraszna-krausz.org.uk
Separate editions of the two works, titled TJ and Double Negative respectively, will be released in South Africa this month.
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by Amanda on Feb 23rd, 2011
The Boston Globe’s Mark Feeney says that David Goldblatt is “among the greatest of living documentary photographers”. Goldblatt, who won the Hasselblad Award in 2006 (the photography equivalent of a Nobel), is currently running an exhibition at the University Museum of Contemporary Art at Amherst, Massachusetts, titled “Intersections Intersected: The Photography of David Goldblatt”.
Viewing the exhibition, Feeney says that calling Goldblatt a documentary photographer seems insufficient. To Feeney, Goldblatt is a poet of the lens: his images are “at once lyrical and stunted, unswervingly compassionate and unmistakeably accusatory”:
The number of 20th-century South African writers of international repute is impressively disproportionate: Alan Paton, Athol Fugard, Andre Brink, Breyten Breytenbach, Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee. Yet how many people much beyond Cape Town recognize the names of such photographic contemporaries of theirs as Ernest Cole, Guy Tillim, or, above all, David Goldblatt.
Goldblatt, who turned 80 in November, is among the greatest of living documentary photographers. He won the Hasselblad Award, something like a Nobel for photography, in 2006. Lee Friedlander won it the year before, Bernd and Hilla Becher the year before that. Goldblatt, in his very different way, is very much their peer. The nearly 120 images that make up “Intersections Intersected: The Photography of David Goldblatt’’ provide abundant and haunting proof of just how good he is. The show runs through May 1 at the University Museum of Contemporary Art, in the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Fine Arts Center.
Last year, Goldblatt collaborated with author Ivan Vladislavic to produce TJ and Double Negative. View a slideshow of some of the images from the book here:
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by Amanda on Dec 6th, 2010
A terrific interview on a terrific collaboration: SA art world maven Bronwyn Law-Viljoen speaks to photographer David Goldblatt and novelist Ivan Vladislavic about working together – and apart – on TJ & Double Negative:
Bronwyn Law-Viljoen: In a recent book called Exposures: Literature and Photography (2009) the scholar Francois Brunet says that he wishes ‘to draw attention to the coincidence of the invention of photography and the idea of photography as a technically and socially based standard of (visual) truth, with this post-Romantic advent of literature as the culturally sanctioned expression of the creative self.’ He goes on to assert that ‘If Romanticism can be defined, among other things, as the striving of the artist to establish the self as “seer” and “sayer”, then in some ways photography, or the idea of photography, can be considered largely anti-Romantic – a force of assertion of the “one”, the “we”, the discourse of nature and society poised against individual expression.’ I would like to keep this in the background as we talk, as something to come back to in relation to these two works. But let’s start with a few ordinary questions: How was this project conceived? Did it begin with the photographs, or with an idea for a novel about a photographer? Or, with an idea for a ‘book’ on Johannesburg?
David Goldblatt: Ivan and I, over a period of some years, have bumped into each other occasionally and have shared a certain delight in our rather twisted views of things in the world, and Johannesburg in particular. Not so much twisted as very particular, a taste that we shared, as in the nice Hebrew word ta’am. I think we had that in common, and to take it a stage further I invited Ivan to come out with me while I was working. He came and spent a day with me and out of that came a clearer determination to collaborate in some way. I thought Ivan would write a different piece to what he had done before – I imagined that he would work towards some kind of literary essay. I had in fact spoken to some other people to contribute to a book like this. But we had a discussion in which he expressed the desire to be the sole writer and to write specifically for this work, in other words not to contribute a kind of minor key part, but to write a major work. At that point, the collaboration assumed a different, much more definite character. At the same time, I had no idea what he had up his sleeve – I just knew that he wanted to write a piece that would be reflective of and take further our mutual views of some of these things.
Ivan Vladislavic: Before starting Double Negative, I had experience of working alongside visual artists and with photographers – in fact some of the work in Portrait with Keys (2006) appeared in David’s catalogue 51 Years (2001). There I was commissioned to produce a text for the catalogue, but I was given no constraints about form or content. Using some of the Portrait with Keys pieces that were already in progress, I had the opportunity to shape them and shift them in such a way that they would fit with David’s photos, without having to function as a ‘critical essay’ on the work. So that primed me for doing the novel. I was at a point in my own writing trajectory where I didn’t want to do any more documentary or non-fiction pieces about Johannesburg. I wanted to write a novel. Of course, it was immensely appealing to collaborate with David, but the only way I could find of going forward was to say to David that I wanted to write a fiction and, to his credit, he didn’t bat an eyelid.
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by Amanda on Nov 29th, 2010
Wanneer David Goldblatt deur sy kamera kyk, is hy opsoek na teenstrydighede soos die “vreemde saamleef van goed en kwaad”. Hierdie teenstrydighede is byvoorbeeld te sien in sy fotoreeks van Afrikaners.
Vandag is hierdie meesterfotograaf se 80ste verjaarsdag, maar Bettie Lamprecht, wat vir Die Burger ‘n onderhoud met Goldblatt gevoer het, meen sy energieke bewegings en helder geheue verklap beslis nie sy ouderdom nie.
Goldblatt is aan’t skarrel tus-sen oorsigtentoonstellings; Kith, Kin & Khaya is tot Februarie te sien in die Joodse Museum in Kaapstad; in die Joodse Museum in New York is pas ’n oorsigtentoonstelling van hom afgehaal; en in Johannesburg is sy jongste werk te sien in die Goodman-galery.
Niks van sy energieke bewegings of sy manier, vol klein besonderhede met volledige datums oor sy lewe, verraai ’n mens van 80 nie. Nog minder is jy bewus van ouderdom as hy vertel van die nuwe tema, Misdaad, waarmee hy sy bekende Afrikaner- en apartheid-temas opvolg.
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by Amanda on Nov 8th, 2010
Three of the country’s top creative forces came together to entertain and enchant at the Goodman Gallery‘s launch for TJ & Double Negative, a unique collaboration between photographer David Goldblatt and writer Ivan Vladislavic. The discussion on this much-anticipated work was led by eminent wordsmith Marlene van Niekerk – who not only weaved together a truly delightful discussion, but also asked questions in the manner of someone who is able to climb into an author’s psyche (and in this case a photographer’s, too), and seem to reside there, knocking on doors and asking where the biscuits are.
Van Niekerk led Goldblatt and Vladislavic in a conversation around the delicate relationship between the literary and the photographic. Avoiding a scenario where the literary becomes a mere footnote or a review of the visual, or where the photographic is just a visual representation of the story, requires a careful “dialectical process” whereby the two feed into and enhance each other. Goldblatt and Vladislavic appear to have achieved just that, combining two art forms without the one dominating the other to create a work that is not only complementary, but also remarkable.
The work of Goldblatt and Vladislavic – both of, in, and from Johannesburg – captivates through its use of what Van Niekerk described as ”the seductive mysteries of things as they are”. Goldblatt echoed the sentiment: “I’m excited by the existence of things, by the fact that something ‘is’… and somehow, I think, Ivan is excited by the same things, because his books, and particularly Double Negative, concentrate on what ‘is’… that excites me. There is a resonance in the way Ivan seems to see things and the way I see things… Ivan’s delight in the absurd, which again tickles me enormously, and excites me, also drives me mad, because I wish I had that kind of imagination”.
Van Niekerk drew further parallels between the essence of the two works, the attention to detail, the awareness of dimension and an off-beat perfectionism. “The more one studies this work as a whole – the novel and the collection of photographs – the clearer it becomes how carefully and subtly the elements have been positioned, angled, so as to render inexhaustible the resonance and connections between the text and the novel and the photographic series and the captions… Entering the work, for me, was like Alice going down the rabbit hole”.
The physical product of the book – the edition itself – was created across four countries and five cities, but offers an astonishing literary and photographic view of just one place: Johannesburg, revealed obliquely, perhaps, but nonetheless in all its glory.
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by Amanda on Oct 26th, 2010
Umuzi is delighted to invite you to the launch of David Goldblatt and Ivan Vladislavic’s TJ & Double Negative at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg.
The collaboration marks a unique event in publishing: the work of a world-renowned photographer and a world-class novelist brought together in one collector’s edition.
David and Ivan will be in conversation with award-winning author Marlene van Niekerk.
We look forward to welcoming you at the gallery!
Event Details
- Date: Saturday, 06 November 2010
- Time: 10:30 AM for 11:00 AM
- Venue: Goodman Gallery, 163 Jan Smuts Ave
Parkwood
Johannesburg | Map
- Guest Speaker: Marlene van Niekerk
- RSVP: lara@goodman-gallery.com, 011 788 1113
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