David Goldblatt, boyishly youthful in all but age, chose to celebrate his eightieth birthday by holding an exhibition of his own work at the Market Photo Workshop – the school he founded in Johannesburg in 1989, with the primary aim of introducing photographic skills to young blacks disadvantaged by apartheid. The school, which has been non-racial from the start, is flourishing: a lively centre of information and debate about the visual arts, offering courses in photojournalism and documentary photography, with 150 to 200 graduates each year – and Goldblatt is flourishing wonderfully too.

In the last twenty years he has become internationally renowned: recipient of the Hasselblad, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Lucie awards, his reputation has been further established by exhibitions at MoMA and Documenta, and a retrospective exhibition that toured galleries and museums around the world, as well as the publication of many books of his work.

But Goldblatt remains true to his dictum that “the arts should always be iconoclastic,” describing himself as “an unlicensed, self-appointed critic of South African society which I continue to explore with a camera.” The critical, critiquing aspect of his work is offset by its visual poetry and – most importantly for this most respectful of photographers – by his own dignifying, humanistic approach: a Goldblatt image typically achieves a balance between scorn, compassion and an artist’s delight in discovery. The weight of narrative is important in a reading of Goldblatt’s work, and the explanation is often in the titles (see the captions to images in this article). He acknowledges the influence of literary friends such as Nadine Gordimer, Barney Simon and Ivan Vladislavic, with whom he has shared projects. His own body of work is as close to literature as pictures can be.

Entitled Fale le Fale, a Sesotho phrase that translates as ‘Here and Here,’ the Workshop exhibition is modest in size but profound and far-reaching in content. It shows Goldblatt’s independence from the contemporary art world that embraces him, and from stereotypical political thinking in South Africa, past and present.

The photographs are printed small and cover a diverse range of themes, stretching from recent work back to the 1960s, with black and white hanging next to digitalised colour. Included are pictures of motorists, photographed by the young Goldblatt in his rear view mirror: a scathing depiction of white South Africans at the time, they all look grim and bad-tempered. Menu (1971) is a reflection of colonial aspirations for “English” respectability – taped onto a brick wall outside a downmarket hotel, the bill of fare offers Potage or Consommé and Baked Rice Pudding.

Among his recent work are portraits of ex-offenders, each with a detailed history of the crime – they are also at the current Venice Biennale – and triptychs, which show different aspects of a subject, extending the narrative or, as Goldblatt says, “showing what is around the corner”. Willem Vorster with friends, family, house and garden, 2009 shows the mud brick house and garden carefully created by a man who is disabled and unemployed, and as the camera takes in the harsh environment it also reveals a row of modest prefab houses in the background that are the embodiment of Vorster’s dream.

What made Goldblatt choose these particular images, I asked him.  “I thought I would like a ‘conversation’ with the students of the Workshop and that it might be an idea to show work from different areas of interest rather than something strongly thematic,” he replied. “Then, as well, the spaces seemed to lend themselves to that idea. So I said to the curators, John Fleetwood and Molemo Moiloa of the Workshop, that I would like to bring together ‘bits and pieces’, things that I have never shown or printed before, together with other work. They had a strong sense of what might interest and provoke students and so, together, we chose the work.”

Asked whether he kept the format small for practical reasons, he said, “I didn’t want to overwhelm. The work needed to be not only accessible but within the grasp of students’ own printmaking possibilities. Smaller rather than larger seemed right in those spaces.”

Goldblatt’s work is usually exhibited large-scale these days. Stepping up for a close scrutiny – rather than stepping back for a long view – is a reminder of his early exhibitions, and the rather private experience of entering into a different, uncomfortable and very intense world. At Kevin Kwanele’s Takwaito Barber, Lansdowne Road, Khayelitsha, Cape Town, in the time of AIDS, 2007 is simultaneously on display at the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, but in large format. The big print is a more impressive image and shows the detail better; the small version is less like an artwork, more like a human document and perhaps more poignant.

Unexpectedly this photograph makes me think of Piero della Francesca’s Nativity. Both show disparate characters in a bleached and dusty landscape under a limpid sky; each of them is differently occupied, and looking in a different direction. Both have a strange sense of stillness. And both have a common narrative that links the characters and makes sense of the composition – in Khayelitsha, the repeated AIDS symbols create the narrative. But mostly it is the clarity of light in Goldblatt’s photograph that reminds me of Piero, whose paintings are always bathed in light. In both artists, light imparts an atmosphere of reason and serenity.

Full title of Here, in 2007, Ellen Pakkies strangled her son Abie. Lavender Hill, Cape Town. 12 September 2010:
Ellen was sentenced to three years in prison suspended and 62 hours of community service. There were extenuating circumstances. Her son Abie, the youngest of three, started using tik when he was 13. He robbed Ellen and her husband of everything: money, clothes, bed linen, dishes, appliances, copper pipes and taps in their house. He smashed their home to pieces and terrorised them. Through it all, she cared for him. She wanted him to feel that he belonged somewhere. She couldn’t throw him out onto the streets, because she had come from the streets herself.

Her mother was homeless when Ellen was an infant. They moved into a backyard room in Kensington when Ellen was two and her mother got married. Ellen was four when the boys next door began molesting her, six when another neighbour, a known murderer, first raped her. Her parents drank heavily. Ellen cared for the children born to the marriage, but had no friends. By the time she was 11 she had been abducted twice by sexual predators. She was 13 when her parents allowed a known rapist to share her bed because he brought liquor into the house. She ran away. She’d had four years of primary school.

Ellen lived on the streets, eating garbage and selling her body. Her first child, conceived in rape, was born when she was 17. She married at 18. The union lasted 6 months. Her second marriage lasted 2 years, and she had two sons, Abie and his brother. She married Ontil, her husband today, when she was 28. At the time of the murder she worked at an orphanage where she was happy; the children taught her new things, like how to swim and to play, and she could help them, because she knew where they came from. Today, she helps other women with addicted children.

Exhibition continues at 2 President Street, Newtown, Johannesburg 2001 until 29 July, 2011

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August 1 to November 1, 2010
11 West 53 Street, between 5th and 6th avenues
New York City, 212 708 9400

Art has its objects and MoMA has its mediums.

Considering how much energy artists of the last 120 years have put into subverting boundaries, testing conventions, inventing ostentatiously category-defying new techniques, and tapping emphatically non-fine art technologies it is supremely curious that modernism’s principal collecting and theorizing institution is so rigidly organized by medium-defined curatorial departments. Prints and Illustrated Books, Drawings, Film and Media, Photography: what a glutton for punishment MoMA is, to demarcate so unruly a period along the lines of the very disciplines it subverted.

Even stranger, having divvied up the century by medium, is that the two time-hallowed activities that witnessed most acutely the striving for medium specificity are actually thrust together.  Painting and Sculpture is the grand duchy among the fiefdoms—perhaps, indeed (along late Hapsburg lines) the dual monarchy. MoMA’s taxonomy spotlights a struggle at the heart of modernism between materialism and transcendence, essence and dissolution—the very codependency, perhaps, that keeps painting and sculpture together.

Enter the fray an exhibition that offers a provocatively novel take on the interplay of mediums, The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today.  Organized by Roxana Marcoci, a curator from Photography, this refreshing, audacious, thought-provoking survey brings together some marvelous photography—but it tells a sad tale about sculpture.  For the show reinforces many of the problems with institutional modernism’s definitions of mediums.  As this show argues, photography is the medium through which the majority of people in the world have come to know sculpture – André Malraux’s “museum without walls” – and yet in its democratizing of sculpture the young medium has played snake to sculpture’s Laocoön, feeding voraciously on a dying hero.

This might seem like miscasting to the traditional view in which painting, not sculpture, is usurped by photography. My point is that while, in reproduction, painting loses, never mind its aura Walter Benjamin, its surface and color and relative size it keeps its dimension and at least its internal scale.  Sculpture, on the other hand, is at the mercy of photography’s interpretation of it.  Context trumps intention. Sculpture, you could say, becomes an extra in its own biopic. At the very historic juncture, furthermore, at which sculpture insists on truth to materials, and demands to be experienced “in the round,” it suffers to be flattened to be better known.

The Original Copy compounds sculpture’s problem by presenting joint winners and a poor third among various strands of sculptural photography. There is photography of sculpture, and photography as sculpture. The  consolation prize goes to photography for sculpture. Where it could be the subject of photography sculpture becomes its motif, which is not the same thing.  And as the camera becomes the means by which the sculptor reconceived the medium as whatever it is that he or she, the sculptor, is doing, rather than a thing or a process (art’s objects), the camera hastened the demise of medium specificity.  Painting is either alive or dead.  Sculpture, on the other hand, must endure a sort of zombie state in which it is congratulated for looking so healthy when actually it has ceased to be a cast, or a carving, or a welded or assembled thing, to become instead merely a found (as likely by the camera as the hand) object or a walk in the countryside or the artist singing vaudeville on a table in the gallery with his boyfriend.

Ms. Marcoci steps into sculpture and yet steps around it at the same time.  She gives us, in her medium, the fate of another medium. And yet her show – kudos for honoring the boundaries of medium-balkanized MoMA – is devoid of sculpture. One section of the show – its geographic but not thematic heart – packs a veritable retrospective of Constantin Brancusi’s own photographs of his own sculpture in a display of 26 prints, predominantly borrowed from the Centre Pompidou. In a feat of restraint – or missed opportunity – there are no examples (as there could easily have been) of the very works the Romanian photographed.  If there had been, an updated definition of sculpture would have presented itself as being what you bump into when you step back to admire a photograph of a sculpture.

The show claims a thematic organization, but is actually more chronological than intended, for a definite narrative unfolds. At the outset, photography is at the service of sculpture.  By the middle, it flips, to devour sculpture, to deny that statuary and ornaments are distinct from any other class of object one might encounter in life.  And in the end, photography is sculpture, whichever side of the lens the sculptor places him or herself.

“Sculpture in the Age of Photography,” the show’s opening section, marks an innocent moment when the camera quivers humbly before ancient stones.  A Lorraine O’Grady conceptual work juxtaposing a portrait of a contemporary African-American woman and Nefertiti’s sister Mutnedjimet, or Barbara Kruger’s Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face (1981), try to throw us off the path, but these accent, rather than disrupt, a display of often exquisite photographs of classical and renaissance statues. Adam Fenton, William Henry Fox Talbot or Stephen Thompson are let loose in the British Museum or places like it, while Clarence Kennedy captures loving details in a 1933 set of The Tomb by Antonio Rosselino for the Cardinal of Portugal. Whether these images are viewed in intentional terms as functional or formal, as essays in light and shade they exploit photography’s capacity to capture textures, to engender a sense of the object’s visceral presence.  Sculpture, in return, was the perfectly behaved sitter when long exposure required composure.

Rodin hijacks this calm formalism to insist on the melodrama of chiaroscuro in heavily directed images of his works.  Whether from Eugène Druet, Jacques-Ernest Bulloz, or most famously the American Edward Steichen, the sculptor enlisted interpretative artists to serve up propaganda for his romanticism.  Steichen’s portrait of the master in Rodin – The Thinker (1902) employs double exposure to abut bronze and marble, maker and made.  The other side of Rodin was that he opened up his creative process to photography, documenting the evolution of sculptural ideas.  Rodin tapped opposing powers of photography, to evoke mystery and to demystify.

While Rodin threw open the studio doors to photography, Eugène Atget, that industrious flâneur, took a camera around the metropolis, as far as Versailles, to capture baroque statuary in a campaign that was at once encyclopedic and wistful.  From his gentle humor The Original Copy segues to the sharper ironies of Dada.  Dust Breeding (1920), Man Ray’s photograph of Marcel Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare lying in shattered grace in a New York loft, is co-attributed on the exhibition label to both men.  But why? This is a photograph by one of the masters of that medium.  The sculpture that is its subject is cropped and in a state of decay .  (It would subsequently be cleaned by Duchamp and reassembled, some of its dust fixed into selective areas of the glass.)  Yes, the maker of the object collaborated, perhaps directed, the photographer.  But Rodin is not co-credited on any of the images that he, arguably more forcefully directed than the legendarily laissez-faire Duchamp.

This theme of authorship will take two further twists in the course of The Original Copy.  Where Duchamp and Man Ray share the author line of their label, each one in capital letters, by the last segment of the show, “The Performing Body as Sculptural Object,” the artist is the performer not the snapper.  Yves Klein is the credited artist in Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void, rendering his feat all the more acrobatic.  In parentheses, on the small print line of medium details, Harry Shunk and János Kender are credited for the photograph.  And this from a curator from Photography.

Similarly credited are Peter Moore for Yayoi Kusama, Robert R. McElroy for Robert Whitman and for Jim Dine, Max Baker for Red Grooms, Julian Wasser for Claes Odenburg, and so on.  And in this section, for Tonsure (1921), in which a pipe smoking Duchamp, with a star shaved into his scalp, is photographed from behind, it is “MARCEL DUCHAMP …. (…photograph by Man Ray.)”  The label for the photograph of Gilbert and George performing Great Expectations (1972) is unencumbered with the name of any photographer. I for one can’t tell whether this is because Gilbert and George set up the camera on a timer themselves or because the photographer was some jobbing hack paid by the hour who forgot to leave a calling card.

In the historical process by which sculpture is no longer a thing one has made somewhere else, but is instead a gesture made before the camera, a curious upstairs-downstairs, gentlemen and players game of class is enacted – a coda to the paragone debates (Leonardo versus Michelangelo) of the high renaissance.  Now that the sculptor no longer “gets dirty” – from sculpture that is; he or she gets more than dirty, as Dine and Kusama and Gilbert and George and Cindy Sherman all demonstrate, in their performances – the dematerialization of the art object elevates the sculptor to a higher class, the class of thinking (rather than making) artist, to be rewarded with attributed authorship of works (photographs) they didn’t make.  And to earn that honor they had to stop making works in their own medium.

Everything started so amicably in this show, with albumen virtually caressing marble, that the divorce half way through of photography and sculpture, with no joint custody, is all the more brutal. Dropped from the narrative are non-celebrity photographers who actually enriched their medium at the service of sculpture: I’m thinking of John Riddy’s work for Anthony Caro for instance or Aurelio Amendola’s on Michelangelo. (Incidentally, why are there no Henry Moore photographs of Henry Moore?)

As to the divorce: On the one side are first rate image makers for whom second rate statuary happens to be their motif.  Lee Friedlander, for instance, who covers America as intrepidly as Atget did Paris to catch the bathos of small town Civil War memorials; or the South African David Goldblatt whose lens is attuned to a bitter sweet post-Apartheid topography, as in Monument Honoring the “Contribution of the Horse to South African History,” Erected by the Rapportryers of Bethulie in 1982. Laura Rautenbach was the Sculptor (2005) in which the earnest work of a pompier animalier has had to be placed in a huge cage to keep thieves off the bronze.

On the other side are photographers whose capture of wondrous forms in nature or culture constitutes a kind of found sculpture, brought to life in two dimensions: Polish photographer Alina Szapocznikow’s Photosculptures of 1971 directly recall Brassaï’s Involuntary Sculpture series, close by, of 1932.  Interspersed among various kitsch findings of the young sculptor Rachel Harrison are a few shots of historic sculpture, in Voyage of the Beagle 2007. These works are heir to a genre that could be classed as the sculptural photograph – the marionettes, dummies, prosthetic limbs and dismembered dolls of André Kertész, Hans Bellmer, Eward Weston, Walker Evans and Iwao Yamawaki – that fills a section titled “The Pygmalian Complex: Animate and Inanimate Figures.”

They say child of divorce can still respect both parents, and that perhaps is the case with Cyprien Gaillard, the young French artist (savior, to my mind, of the New Museum’s Younger than Jesus) whose installation of Geographical Analogues is the closest thing the show has to sculpture.  In table mounted frames with concave bases he has assembled diamond grids of nine Polaroids each (shades of the Bechers) of distressed and forlorn sculptures from various eras, whether prehistoric dolmens or grim World War II memorials, often amidst vandalized utopian housing projects.  Gaillard is rather like a land artist whose nature happens to be failed sculpture.

Rodin and Brancusi could attempt, through deft camera work of their own or others, to steer viewers’ experience of their work.  For earthwork or land artists like Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer and Richard Long, the camera, used with less artistry, is more urgently required, to reify conceptual or remote or ephemeral happenings that would otherwise be lost.  The photograph is a souvenir of an event few if any viewers can have witnessed.  This is the truly original copy as it alone was intended to survive, and it alone can originate a response.

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