TJ 1948-2010
Although I have been photographing in Johannesburg (Joburg) for some 60 years I have never attempted an essay that would embrace the city as a whole. My Joburg photography relates only to a few of its parts. The incompleteness of my coverage is partly a reflection of my interests at the time, but partly it relates to the nature of this place, to the way Joburg is. Almost from its beginnings as a mining camp in 1886 the demography of Joburg and therefore its spaces have been deeply fractured by the demand of whites, enforced by law, that people of colour be kept at a distance - though not at such a distance as to deny the city their labour and the spending of their income. For the first century of its existence almost all distribution of the spaces and municipal services of the City of Johannesburg have derived from this simple racist dictum and the fact that votes and most of the wealth were with whites. The effects on urban planning, housing, public transport, street paving, street lighting, energy, sanitation, telephones, policing, parks, playgrounds etc, were profound. The outcome has been a geography so deeply fractured as to make any tolerable integrity almost unimaginable. Mandatory racial segregation has ended; people may now live where they wish and many do. But class, largely embedded in race, has become the divisive force. Class divides the city emphatically into parts, those crowded by a vast underclass of for the most part poorly educated, chronically unemployed blacks, and others, increasingly composed of electrically walled estates, occupied by a growing and ever-richer plutocracy of blacks and whites. My photography of Joburg has largely followed a few of the fault lines of its racial and class fractures.

Ex-Offenders
Very many South Africans have been the victims of crime, often violent. We have either suffered it personally or we know someone close who has. With much stress and considerable expenditure of income we try to protect our persons and property. Yet withal we remain extremely vulnerable to attack by people who would seize our property and damage or end our lives. Having been a victim of armed robbers, muggers and thieves I asked myself who are the people who are doing this to us. Are they monsters? Ordinary people? Could they be my children? Are they you and me? I wanted to burrow under the statistics and meet some of these doers of crime as individuals. I wanted to do portraits and ask, Who are you, what makes you tick, what did you do, how did you come to do it, what do you think of what you did, what will you do now? Who to photograph and where? Even if I could meet active criminals they would not be likely to agree to being photographed or to answering such questions. I did not want to photograph prisoners in jail. I wanted to meet perpetrators as ‘ordinary’ people such as one might encounter in a street or supermarket. And I wanted to do this in situations that were somehow related to the crimes they had committed or of which they had been accused. So I came to people who had been accused of crime, found guilty and been punished. If they had been in prison, they were now free or on parole. Where to do the portraits? It seemed to me that the scene of crime is likely to be a place of special significance. Life-changing events were probably experienced there. So, with the exception of two portraits that I did at the place of arrest, it is at the scene of crime that I have been doing the photographs. Thus these photographs and the stories of the people within them. Most were trying, often in desperately difficult circumstances, to go straight. Hence I call them not criminals, not offenders, but ex-offenders. David Goldblatt Décembre 2010