Artist, David Goldblatt: My name is David Goldblatt, and I'm drawn to photograph life in South Africa. I'm involved in this place.
During the years of apartheid. I must say I found color as a medium too sweet, black and white was the medium that seemed to me to be necessary to say the things that I wanted to say about life in apartheid South Africa. It gave the possibility of a certain degree of abstraction and yet a strong sense of reality of verisimilitude.
I was driving past this house and the man was working in the garden in a pair of overalls, and I asked if I could please take a photograph of him and his wife. I think she was standing by and watching. And he said, certainly, but please wait. And they disappeared into the house and he came out dressed in his full regalia, in a suit.
I then asked if I could come into the house, and we went into the house, and that's exactly as they were, and that's what I photographed.
Narrator: The bed is propped up by paint cans as protection from a spirit called the tokoloshe.
David Goldblatt: The tokoloshe is a mythical figure. A dwarf whose penis is so great that he carries it over his shoulder and he goes around at night and impregnates women and haunts houses.
He's not regarded as a friendly sort of mythical figure, and in order to protect themselves against the tokoloshe, people will often put the bed on bricks or on tins as you see there.
There's a more practical explanation as well, and that is to make more space for possessions under the bed, because these houses were very cramped.