Markers of Presence | David Goldblatt | Goodman Gallery Cape Town

Goodman Gallery is pleased to present Markers of Presence, an exhibition of colour photographs by David Goldblatt. In the late 1990s Goldblatt began exploring the use of colour in his personal photography. Prompted by a new political dispensation in post-apartheid South Africa, as well as technical advances in digital reproduction, Goldblatt felt that colour best captured his feelings about the time.

“Lyricism seemed not only permissible but possible. In the late ‘90s I became aware of colour as a particular quality of this place and its light that I wanted to explore. It seemed ‘thin’, yet intense,” wrote Goldblatt in the publication, Regarding Intersections (Steidl, 2014).

Goldblatt’s colour photographs are collected under a wide-ranging essay, Intersections, a body of work made between 2001 to 2012, subsequently published as Regarding Intersections and Intersections Intersected. This work included explorations of land and landscape, people, towns and monuments – all held together by Goldblatt’s fundamental interest in our values as a society, and how we express those values in the marks we make and leave behind. Markers of Presence presents a cross-section of photographs from Intersections. In light of the searching spirit that preoccupied Goldblatt during this period, the exhibition brings together five currents that underpin the series.