Somerset House
Michael Hoppen Gallery will be exhibiting work from 16 artists
David Goldblatt’s 'In Boksburg' stands as one of the most important observations of a middle-class white community in South Africa during the apartheid years. Published in 1982, it presents an accumulation of everyday details from the community of Boksburg through which a larger portrait is revealed of white societal values within a racially divided state.
The spread of Boksburg’s new suburbs across the veld and the daily life of the town encapsulated - to Goldblatt’s eye - the intricacies of the lunacy of ordinary white middle-class life in the years of apartheid. As he wrote in the foreword: ‘Boksburg is shaped by white dreams and white proprieties. Most of its townspeople pursue the family, social and civic concerns of respectable burghers anywhere, while locked into a deep and portentous fixity of self-elected legislated whiteness. Blacks are not of this town. They serve it, trade with it, receive charity from it and are ruled, rewarded and punished by its precepts. Some are its privileged guests. But all who go there, do so by permit or invitation, never by right.’
A world-renowned photographer Goldblatt is in numerous international collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, MoMA, New York, SFMoMA, San Fransisco and Getty Museum, Los Angeles. We are incredibly lucky to be in possession of this rare set of vintage prints from this seminal body of work. They come directly from his printer who he gifted them to.
Works exhibited:
Eyesight testing at the Vosloorus Eye Clinic of the Boksburg Lions Club, 1979/80
30 x 30.3 cm
Vintage gelatin silver print, printed 1982
Signed in pencil on verso
Hypermarket employee collecting trolleys, 1979/80
30 x 30.3 cm
Vintage gelatin silver print, printed 1982
Signed in pencil on verso
Saturday afternoon in Sunward park, 1979/80
30 x 30.3 cm
Vintage gelatin silver print, printed 1982
Signed in pencil on verso
Click here to enquire about our room at this years Photo London.
Somerset House - Ground Floor, Booth A3
