NEW HAVEN — All photographs bear witness, literally so. They record a given moment in time that demonstrably happened. What makes the happening of the moment demonstrable is, of course, the photograph.
That word “witness” covers a lot of photographic territory, though, from selfies on Instagram to evidence admitted in court. In rare instances, bearing witness has a much larger meaning: the recording of fact as the honoring of a moral imperative. Photography, with its immediacy and specificity and verisimilitude, has a unique power to respond to that imperative and, in doing so, make those who see a certain image respond to it: not telling people how to feel and think, but making them feel and think.
All of which is to say that the medium has known few greater bearers of witness than David Goldblatt (1930-2018). That greatness is evident throughout the career retrospective “David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive.” It runs through June 22 at the Yale University Art Gallery.
Satisfyingly extensive, the show includes nearly 125 photographs by Goldblatt, work by South African photographers who were his contemporaries or friends or students, maquettes, contact sheets, vintage magazines, and various documents, including text for a classified advertisement from the early ′70s. The ad asked interested readers to let Goldblatt photograph them, offering assurances that the photographer had “no ulterior motive,” hence the exhibition subtitle.
Goldblatt’s artistic stature makes his relative unfamiliarity surprising. That’s owing in large part to his having faced a kind of cultural double bind. He lived in a society, apartheid-era South Africa, that needed witness borne as have few others. Yet the ostracism of that society meant his work lacked the prominence and recognizability enjoyed by lesser photographers elsewhere.
Also, the work doesn’t fit easily into a particular genre or category. There are portraits, landscapes, reportage, though that’s too limiting a term. In the late ′90s Goldblatt fully embraced color, a further diversification. Color had the effect, however paradoxical, of softening, at least somewhat, the harsh South African light. Note the delicate blueness of the cloudless sky in a 2007 photograph of an outdoor barber in Cape Town.
Goldblatt photographed mines, churches, people in their homes, people on the street, workers on the job, Soweto, scenes of wealth, scenes of poverty, and most tellingly perhaps, how those scenes could overlap and confound an observer. Yet he avoided cheap incongruities, even if ever there was a society of not just cheap but grotesque incongruities it was South Africa during those years and beyond. What unites such variousness is a consistent scrupulosity of vision: unfussy, unfancy, unblinking, unfailingly humane, and no less unfailingly curious.
Being white put Goldblatt in the minority in South Africa, albeit a minority with overwhelming power and no hesitation to use it. Being the grandson of Lithuanian Jews made him an outsider within that minority. It was a status that allowed him to notice things — that made him need to notice them — others might overlook or, far more commonly, choose to ignore. What Goldblatt found himself photographing was, as he once put it, “the quiet and commonplace, where nothing ‘happened’ and yet all was contained and immanent.”
The show is arranged thematically, under the headings “Informality,” “Near/Far,” “Disbelief,” “Working People,” “Extraction,” “Assembly,” and “Dialogues.” The abstractness of the groupings underscores how the images are anything but abstract. “Dialogues” deserves special mention. It consists of the work of those other photographers, including Ernest Cole, Jo Ractcliffe, and Santu Mofokeng. The section comes midway through the show, a nice placement and indicative of the care devoted to the retrospective, jointly put together by YUAG, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Fundación MAPFRE, in Madrid.
Other than “Extraction,” about mining (Goldblatt’s first photographic job was working for South Africa’s largest mining operation, Anglo-American Corporation), the categories are usefully elastic. They organize but don’t confine. That’s appropriate, as confinement registers throughout the show in other ways: not just in the innumerable restrictions on Black South Africans evident in so many of the photographs but also the way Goldblatt captures space.
Part of the fascination of the show is seeing how little Goldblatt owes to other photographers. Artistically, he’s very much his own man. His photographs of Afrikaner farmers have drawn comparisons to Walker Evans’s of Southern tenant farmers. Actually, all they have in common is arduous agriculture (endured by the subjects) and human sympathy (extended by the photographers). Maybe that’s another reason Goldblatt doesn’t have the fame he deserves: He doesn’t constellate, and constellations can make the work of art historians, curators and, yes, reviewers, far easier.
In that treatment of space, though, one does see an affinity, and it’s thrilling, with Robert Frank. Frank’s “The Americans” is less about the people in his photographs than the space that contains them. Something similar is going on in Goldblatt’s images, his rural ones especially. The land and sky — the amazing, pitiless South African sky — take on an eloquence to rival that of the faces of the people Goldblatt photographs, and that is eloquence of a very high order.
These photographs are in no way modest — excellence, always, is its own, justified, immodesty — but the photographer is. “I let my subjects place themselves and I try to photograph quite literally what is in front of the camera,” Goldblatt said in 1974. “You could call it a quality of deliberate accident.”
That personal modesty, which is to say an absence of self-importance, extends to an absence of self-righteousness. “Over time, it grew evident that the real conflict was … how to square one’s conscience with being white in this country. This was not hair-splitting. It was a moral dilemma that arose in numerous ways in daily life.” That numerousness is seen throughout the show, and that dilemma felt throughout it. Bearing witness does not mean preaching or making judgments, except, it may be, of oneself.
Goldblatt’s work has a fundamental visual simplicity, even to the point of austerity. This helps contain the emotional power of so many of the images while also deepening it. Injustice and pain and exploitation when presented as INJUSTICE and PAIN and EXPLOITATION are announcements, and announcements are quickly moved on from. Goldblatt offers simple declarative sentences, not that there’s anything simple about them. Emphasizing the significance of description and documentation are the increasingly long titles Goldblatt gave his photographs. That’s part of the deliberateness of the accident.
YUAG has a nice surprise for visitors, a surprise since “Photography and the Botanical World” is buried on the gallery website. It’s a terrific little show, with more than 40 photographs of fruits, vegetables, and flowers. It runs through June 8.
As one might expect with such subject matter, there are photographs from Karl Blossfeldt, Imogen Cunningham, and Anna Atkins, as well as André Kertész’s “Melancholic Tulip.” But also on display are a Chuck Close sunflower, an Andy Warhol Polaroid of Bella Abzug holding a rose, a Stephen Shore view of Monet’s garden at Giverny, and a Mark Klett cactus.
Goldblatt’s here, too, with an agave so large the frame crops its leaves (another instance of confinement). He offers the picture as an homage to the Mexican master Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Such a tribute is a reminder that bearing witness can have another, happier aspect: offering praise.
DAVID GOLDBLATT: NO ULTERIOR MOTIVE
PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE BOTANICAL WORLD
At Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel St., New Haven, through June 22 and June 8, respectively. 203-432-0600, artgallery.yale.edu
Mark Feeney can be reached at mark.feeney@globe.com.