David Goldblatt rarely made a photograph that shouts. His pictures are level, patient and full of information: a family at lunch on a smallholding, a church in a new suburb, a bank notice in five languages, a bus full of sleeping commuters before dawn. What turns them into a body of work is the way he combined them with words and arranged them in books. For designers who build editorial layouts, reports or exhibition graphics, that combination is the real lesson.
Goldblatt’s photographs are still in copyright, so this guide describes them in text and uses no reproductions; museums such as the Art Institute of Chicago show them on their own sites. For public-domain prints, posters and photographs you can use as references, browse the MGD museum inspiration collection.
Who was David Goldblatt?
The Art Institute of Chicago gives his dates as 1930–2018 and describes him as South African. Obituaries from 1854 Photography and South African History Online record that he was born in Randfontein, a gold-mining town west of Johannesburg, and reports from Al Jazeera and News24 record that he died in Johannesburg on 25 June 2018, aged 87.
According to 1854 Photography, he took over the family clothing shop after his father died in 1962 and sold it the following year to work as a photographer full time. In 1989 he founded the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg; Tate and South African History Online both describe it as a school set up to teach photography and visual literacy, with an emphasis on young Black photographers disadvantaged by apartheid.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York gave him a solo exhibition, David Goldblatt: Photographs from South Africa, from 14 July to 6 October 1998. 1854 Photography notes that he received the Hasselblad Foundation’s award in 2006. In 2018 the Centre Pompidou in Paris held a retrospective, Structures of Dominion and Democracy, reviewed in the London Review of Books.
Key books and dates
1973, On the Mines. His first book, made with an essay by the writer Nadine Gordimer, on South Africa’s gold mines and the people who worked them. Steidl published a revised edition in 2012 that kept the original three chapters.
1975, Some Afrikaners Photographed. Portraits of Afrikaner farmers, families and communities, published in Johannesburg. A revised and enlarged edition, Some Afrikaners Revisited, followed in 2007 with texts by Antjie Krog and Ivor Powell.
1982, In Boksburg. Black-and-white photographs of the white middle-class town of Boksburg in the late 1970s and early 1980s, published in Cape Town. The Art Institute holds prints from this period, such as Girl in her new tutu on the stoep, Boksburg (1980).
1989, The Transported of KwaNdebele. Made with Brenda Goldblatt and the journalist Phillip van Niekerk, it follows Black workers who commuted for hours each day by bus between the KwaNdebele homeland and jobs in Pretoria. The Art Institute holds a group of these prints dated 1983–84, and Steidl reissued the book in an expanded design in 2013.
1998, South Africa: The Structure of Things Then. Published by Oxford University Press and, in New York, by Monacelli, with an essay by Neville Dubow; it appeared in the same year as his MoMA exhibition.
What to look at: captions as part of the picture
Read the titles in any museum list of Goldblatt’s work and you notice how long and exact they are. The Art Institute catalogues one print as Racially segregated beach areas and the boundary between them, Strand, Western Cape. 16 April 1983. Another reads Notices in English, Afrikaans, Sotho, Xhosa and Tsonga, on the bank at New Modderfontein, Benoni. A third, from the KwaNdebele series, begins 3:30 a.m. Going to work and goes on to describe the dim green and red bulbs inside the bus.
These captions do three jobs. They give a place and often a full date, which turns a picture into a record. They name what you might miss, such as a boundary line or the languages on a sign. And they set the tone: plain, factual, without adjectives that tell you how to feel.
For designers, that is a model for any image-led layout. Treat the caption as a designed element, not an afterthought. Decide on a consistent order (subject, place, date), a consistent typographic style, and a consistent voice. Our collection of lettering references is a good place to study how text and image share a page.
Sequence and time: the KwaNdebele series
The Transported of KwaNdebele is built on the clock. The Art Institute’s titles run from 2:40 a.m. Going to work through 4:00 a.m. and onwards to 8:45 p.m. Going home. The time stamp in each title turns a set of photographs into a single long journey, and the reader feels the length of the working day through the sequence.
That is a structural idea any designer can use. A timeline does not need a drawn line; it can live in the captions and the page order. A case study, a scrolling web story or a brand film can be organised the same way, with each frame labelled by time or step so that the structure is visible without extra graphics. If you design printed books, our book design references show other historic ways of pacing image and text.
Structures, signs and plain framing
Many of Goldblatt’s pictures are of buildings and objects rather than people. The Art Institute holds his photographs of a Reformed church in Edenvale (1983), a Dutch Reformed church in a Johannesburg suburb (1986) and a mock Cape Dutch house near Tzaneen (1989). The title of South Africa: The Structure of Things Then points to the same interest in what people build.
The design lesson is about restraint in framing. When the subject is a structure, a sign or a product, a level, frontal view with clear light lets the form and its details speak. It is an approach also associated with the American photographer Walker Evans, and it suits packaging shots, signage audits and architectural portfolios.
His signs are a special case. A bank notice in five languages or a sign marking a segregated beach is lettering with consequences. Photographing it straight, and naming it in the caption, lets the typography carry the history.
Technique: black and white, then colour
The Art Institute’s records trace the change in his materials. Most prints dated from the 1960s to the early 1990s are gelatin silver prints, the standard black-and-white darkroom process. From 2002 onwards many entries are pigment inkjet prints in colour, such as Braiding hair on Bree Street, Johannesburg (2002). Goodman Gallery, which represented him, dates his turn to colour in his personal work to the late 1990s.
Print size changed too. A 1983 KwaNdebele print at the Art Institute has an image about 34 by 23 centimetres, a book-like scale, while a 1965 photograph of bank notices, printed later as a pigment inkjet, is more than a metre across. The same photograph can be an intimate page or a wall-sized statement; designers face the same choice when one image must work in a booklet and on a banner.
The museum record also shows him returning to old subjects: 5:52 a.m. Going to work in 2012 revisits the KwaNdebele commute nearly thirty years later. Revisiting a project with the same framing and caption style is a strong way to show change over time.
How designers can borrow David Goldblatt’s ideas
Write captions as carefully as headlines. Subject, place, date, in one consistent pattern and a calm voice.
Let the sequence carry the story. Order and time stamps can replace diagrams and arrows.
Frame structures straight. Level, frontal views let buildings, signs and products explain themselves.
Design the book, not just the pictures. His career is a run of books, each with a writer’s text and a clear chapter structure.
Choose scale on purpose. Decide whether an image should feel like a page in the hand or a wall in a room.
For other photographers who used plain framing and portrait series, see our guides to Walker Evans and August Sander.
Frequently asked questions
What is David Goldblatt known for?
For photographing South Africa from the 1960s until his death in 2018, in books such as On the Mines (1973), Some Afrikaners Photographed (1975), In Boksburg (1982) and The Transported of KwaNdebele (1989), and for founding the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg in 1989.
Did David Goldblatt photograph in colour?
His apartheid-era personal work is in black and white. He began working in colour in the late 1990s, and many of his photographs from the 2000s are colour pigment inkjet prints.
Where can I see David Goldblatt’s photographs?
The Art Institute of Chicago holds a large group of his prints and staged David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive from December 2023 to March 2024, with 140 works across seven decades. The Museum of Modern Art and other museums also hold his work.
Are David Goldblatt’s photographs public domain?
No. He died in 2018, and his photographs are protected by copyright. This guide describes them in text only; check the rights holder before reproducing any of his images.
