David Goldblatt died on June 25th

TWENTY men move as one, chanting. For a split second you think of the elephants’ march in “The Jungle Book”. Hup. Two. Three. Four. Then you start to see what’s not there. It’s hot. The steel railway track they have hoisted aloft cuts into their shoulders. They have probably been shifting rails for hours. David Goldblatt’s first published photograph, taken near his home town west of Johannesburg in 1946 when he was about 16, has all the characteristics that would make him the most famous chronicler of apartheid. It has absence—the heat, the unseen if obvious overseer—and an atmospheric presence. Between the two, between the presence and the absence, which is really what engages the viewer’s imagination, the photograph bears witness.

In a country that was ruled after 1948 by a government that needed to control information—to “distort, suppress and pummel it” in order to preserve the regime, as one commentator wrote—the photograph-as-witness became the clincher, an irrefutable way of speaking truth to power.