The first major traveling retrospective on South African photographer David Goldblatt
February 21–June 22, 2025
The Yale University Art Gallery is pleased to present David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive, a major traveling retrospective exhibition that spans the seven decades of the South African photographer’s career, from the 1950s through the 2010s, demonstrating Goldblatt’s commitment to showing the realities of daily life in his country.
David Goldblatt (1930–2018) is internationally renowned for his incisive documentation of life in South Africa, particularly during the apartheid era. This exhibition showcases approximately 150 images, including early black-and-white photographs as well as color prints from later in his career. Goldblatt’s photography focuses an unflinching lens onto South African society, capturing the nuanced realities of apartheid and its aftermath. From his most iconic series to such little-known works as Sunday morning: A not-white family living illegally in the “White” group area of Hillbrow, Johannesburg, 1978, these pictures illustrate the everyday effects of the country’s racial segregation policies on its people and environment.
Organized into thematic sections that reflect Goldblatt’s approach and subject matter, the exhibition explores aspects of South African life via images showing a range of sites and activities, from informal settlements and mining communities to portraiture and social gatherings. Photographs are presented in ways that facilitate conversations between them, amplifying Goldblatt’s narrative and artistic dialogues within the sociopolitical breadth of his work. This presentation aims to present his pictures as dynamically interconnected rather than as a static history.
In addition to photographs, the exhibition features Goldblatt’s original book maquettes along with archival materials drawn from the David Goldblatt Photographs and Papers collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which includes contact sheets, notes and correspondence, and magazines that first published his work, all of which offer insights into Goldblatt’s working process and his significant contributions to documentary photography. Complementing the exhibition are photographs by some of Goldblatt’s peers, such as Ernest Cole, Santu Mofokeng, and Jo Ractliffe, as well as a generation of younger South Africans, many of whom Goldblatt mentored, including Lebohang Kganye and Zanele Muholi, placing Goldblatt within a broader and intergenerational network of photographers.
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