David Goldblatt

In 1994, when the government of South Africa officially declared the end of apartheid, Goldblatt began a study of his homeland in a series of photographs he published ten years later in his book Intersections. Goldblatt traveled throughout South Africa to see if and how the new freedoms were being realized. In the broadest sense, the pictures—from a photograph of a sheepherder in a barren landscape to portraits of newly appointed municipal officials in their offices—describe the crossing over from an oppressive government to one of equal rights for all, a process rife with success, failure, promising starts, and ambiguous endings.

In Goldblatt's Intersections photographs, telling details of everyday life reveal the country’s larger cultural and political issues. Like [Walker Evans's] (https://www.moma.org/artists/1777) photographs of America in the 1930s, Goldblatt's pictures will stand as an inviolate record of a turning point in his country's history. In this photograph of a street vendor waiting to sell food to construction workers, the temporal and bare-bones nature of her enterprise is seen in relation to the solid but aesthetically questionable architecture of the office buildings. Under apartheid this woman would not have been allowed to set up shop here; yet the picture describes a continuing disparity between haves and have-nots, the repercussions of years of oppression, and the long journey toward the realization of a just society.