David Goldblatt’s making visible: photographic strategies of rumination, orchestration and circulation

Abstract

This article seeks to understand David Goldblatt’s innovations within the ‘documentary’ photography genre. Arguing that his photographic projects seek public intellectual engagement, it proposes that an understanding of the circulation of Goldblatt’s photographs is critical to grasping the public intellectual engagement of his photographic practice. The article tracks the material forms of photographic circulation, including the texts that accompany the photographs and the texts that flow from them, and argues that photographic public discursive interventions are at once visual, but in exceeding the boundaries of the visual also material and textual. This draws together the forms of circulation and the kinds of publics they address and call into being, not only at the time of the initial production and circulation of the photographs, but also in their archive and its impact on subsequent public discursivity about these photographs.