Telling in images how the marginalized, the disadvantaged, the discriminated live can be done explicitly, showing misery and violence, or one can choose another approach, in which they are shown as people who also smile and want to look good in a portrait. This second path was the one that two figures of photography of the last century frequented: the South African David Goldblatt, who dedicated a large part of his work to the racist regime of the apartheid in her country, and the little-known Consuelo Kanaga, who dealt with the black population and the needy (they were almost always the same) in the United States. Both proposals, by white photographers, can be seen and compared in the Mapfre Foundation, in Madriduntil August 25, as part of the official PHotoEspaña programme. They are also accompanied by two fantastic catalogues.
David Goldblatt (1930-2018), who began taking up photography at just 18, was the first South African photographer to be honoured with a retrospective at MoMA in 1998, for his different interpretation of racial segregation, in which he “portrayed the daily lives of those who suffered from it”, stressed one of the exhibition’s two curators, Judy Ditner, at the press presentation. The grandson of Lithuanian Jews who had fled Europe, as a teenager he witnessed the rise to power of the South African National Party (NP), which established the racist system in 1948.
“His is an indirect, subtle view, which was criticized by other colleagues,” he said. Curator Leslie M. Wilson. “His political opinions were even questioned, but for him the important thing was to look at the apartheid from the small, silent violence, not in the explosive moments.” Goldblatt himself explained it like this: “I don’t know what I would do if I had to photograph a violent scene […] “The events themselves do not interest me as much as the conditions that lead to these events.”
Among the highlights of this exhibition, with almost 160 images and whose title is Without ulterior motives —a phrase taken from the advertisement that Goldblatt placed in the press when he was looking for people to photograph— is his work in gold and platinum mining operations in his country, where the most dangerous jobs were always assigned to black people. Goldblatt captured this in the series On the Mines (1964-1973). He knew that environment, having been born in a mining town, Randfontein, and began his career with advertising assignments from the largest South African company in the sector.
On the tour we can also see images of street musicians and street vendors in Durban, young people from Soweto, workers in their modest homes, the poor neighbourhoods of Cape Town… They are snapshots in which apparently nothing happens, since he always fled from the gruesome, but injustice was latent.
In his career of almost seventy years – in which his book stands out Some Afrikaners Photographedfrom 1975—, he also photographed the architecture and landscapes of South Africa. The exhibition, after having been in Chicago and now in Madrid, will travel to New Haven (Connecticut), where the author’s archive is located.
Ditner acknowledged that this exhibition proposal is risky, since it is organized by themes, not chronologically, which leads to combining, not always successfully, his black and white images with his color ones, which are sometimes disconcerting, because Goldblatt’s best work was in the former.
Precisely when the end was put apartheid, After the referendum in March 1992 (Nelson Mandela became president in 1994), he continued to rely on black and white because he thought it better reflected the harshness of the social situation. It was not until 1999 that he tried colour, with a much less striking result.
The photographic commitment to beauty was not always understood either. Consuelo Kanagaalthough it did leave more space to review the unpleasant reality, as in the image titled Malnutritiona close-up of a sad-looking child, from 1928. Made up of almost 180 images that span his six decades of career, the exhibition, entitled Catch the spiritwhich was already at the KBr Fundación Mapfre in Barcelona this year, is the first monographic exhibition in Europe dedicated to this American from Oregon. After Madrid, the exhibition will stop in New York (a large part of the author’s legacy is in the Brooklyn Museum).
The curator, Drew Sawyersaid that Consuelo Kanaga (1894-1978) began writing texts at only 21 years old for the San Francisco Chronicle —influenced by her mother, a writer—, where she learned to take photographs to illustrate her own articles. Three years later, in 1918, she became a staff photographer for the newspaper, one of the first photojournalists to be hired. “Ahead of her time,” as her friend, fellow photographer Dorothea Lange, said.
Incidentally, in 1922 Kanaga took an image of a worried mother surrounded by her three children, which cannot be ignored as a precedent for Lange’s famous 1936 photo during the Great Depression. She was also friends with Imogen Cunningham, Tina Modotti and Louise Dahl-Wolfe, among others, who were also influenced by her. Kanaga is known in her country for her wonderful portraits of African Americans, taken outside of a journalistic work that lasted three decades.
His most famous image is She is a tree of lifefrom 1950, taken in Florida, in which a woman stands with great dignity accompanied by her two children. She took it on one of her trips to the southern United States to capture the expressions of black workers and children. Always looking for scenes that reflected inequalities, she wrote: “I am sick of seeing colored men and women mistreated by stupid whites.”
However, he hated making a spectacle of poverty. “Kanaga did not take typical documentary images, but direct portraits that focused on aesthetics. It was his way of trying not to perpetuate the negative stereotypes associated with this community,” Sawyer stressed. Like Goldblatt, his photos, in this case those of the Harlem population, were criticized for not showing the expected stereotype. This was despite the fact that Kanaga participated in progressive photographic movements in the United States, such as the New York Photo League, and in the labor photography movement in San Francisco, for which he took images of workers’ protests.
The paradox is that her private life limited her career. Married three times, she interrupted her work to look after the house and her husbands, whom she even managed to support thanks to the income from her portraits of wealthy people and artists, in which her taste for experimenting with exposure times can be seen.
The worst thing, however, was that during the numerous moves “many of her negatives from the 1930s and 1940s, from her time as a photojournalist, were lost,” the commissioner lamented. In addition, from 1950 onwards she went to live with her husband, the painter Wallace Putnamto a house on the outskirts of New York. There he focused his camera on landscapes and the interior of elegant houses for reports in home magazines. This is one of the reasons why his work declined, although the curator points out more reasons: “His interest in showing the beauty of blackness, which was not understood, and the fact that there were not many written references to his work.” This exhibition is a great way to get closer to his work.
‘David Goldblatt. No hidden agenda’ and ‘Consuelo Kanaga. Catching the spirit’. Mapfre Foundation. Madrid. Until August 25.
You can follow Babelia in Facebook and Xor sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
#David #Goldblatt #Consuelo #Kanaga #photographers #injustices #subtlety