Some Afrikaners Photographed

David Goldblatt
9783958295513 / 3958295517
Some Afrikaners Photographed

Some Afrikaners Photographed

David Goldblatt
9783958295513 / 3958295517
Publisher Steidl 2020
Edition Hardcover , 240 pages
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Publisher's description

Publisher’s description
Goldblatt began working on Some Afrikaners photographed, first published in 1975, in 1963. He had sold his father’s clothing store where he worked, and become a full-time photographer. The ruling Afrikaner National Party—many of its leaders and members had supported the Nazis in the Second World War—was firming its grip on the country in the face of black resistance. Yet Goldblatt was drawn not to the events of the time but to “the quiet and commonplace where nothing ‘happened’ and yet all was contained and immanent.” Through these photos he explored his ambivalence towards the Afrikaners he knew from his father’s store. Most, he guessed, were National Party voters, yet he experienced them as “austere, upright, unaffected people of rare generosity of spirit and earthy humor.” Their potency and contradictions moved and disturbed him; their influence pervaded his life.
The book includes an essay by South African writer Antjie Krog: “Three kinds of Afrikaners look out at us from these photographs,” she writes, “of which the poor Afrikaner is the most haunting—the simple one who, by the sweat of his brow, eats his bread in isolation.” Art critic Ivor Powell charts the outraged reaction of the Afrikaner media towards photos that showed rural Afrikaners at a time when the Afrikaner elite was trying to establish itself on the international stage, as well as his own reaction to the original book: “It was all but incandescent with tension and revelation, with a sense of souls being held up to scrutiny, of skins being peeled away.”

Specifications

Book title Some Afrikaners Photographed
Photographer David Goldblatt
ISBN 10 3958295517 / 3-95829-551-7       
ISBN 13 9783958295513 / 978-3-95829-551-3
Publisher Steidl
Publish date Sep 2019
Publish year 2020
Book format Hardcover
Book format details clothbound
Language English
Pages 240 pages
Number of photographs 240 photographs
Dimensions 26 x 28 cm / 10.25 x 11 inches
Weight 1,9 kg

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