Acts of Witness: Photographs of Spatial Apartheid

A black-and-white photograph of a cityscape seen in the distance beyond an open, arid landscape. In the central middle ground, a ruinated structure is visible.

David Goldblatt, The destruction of District Six under the Group Areas Act, Cape Town, 5 May 1982, 1982. Gelatin silver print. Yale University Art Gallery, Purchased with a gift from Jane P. Watkins, M.P.H. 1979; with the Leonard C. Hanna, Jr., Class of 1913, Fund; and with support from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. © David Goldblatt 

Join us for a lecture celebrating the opening of the exhibition David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive with the South African architect and scholar Ilze Wolff, Dean’s Visiting Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University, New York. Goldblatt’s pictures offer key and focused views on spatial apartheid in South Africa. This lecture looks behind, above, below, and beside Goldblatt’s lens to describe the broad territory of social imaginaries that accompany his images. In other words, if Goldblatt’s photographs bear witness to the violence of spatial injustice, what are the constructions that then give contexts to these images, images which in themselves become acts of witness? Generously sponsored by Jane P. Watkins, M.P.H. 1979, and the Martin A. Ryerson Lectureship Fund. 

This lecture accompanies a preview of and opening reception for the exhibition David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive. Exhibition co-organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and the Yale University Art Gallery, in collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid.