The Big Issue interviewer asked me if the work which I did addressed the decline of the white regime. I replied thus,
‘I think it’s stretching it to say that the decline of the white regime is a theme in my work. That said, as a white man photographing South Africa, the decline of the “white regime” is going to permeate my photography. Maybe it’s implicit in what I do and maybe you are right, which is good because these subtexts mature with age and sometimes become poignant even if they were not planned that way.’
I got to thinking about how the context in which work is viewed changes over time and how work can change it spots. In Boksburg, by Goldblatt, particularly struck me as a body of work whose meaning has been adapted to current thinking, in hindsight of course. It has also struck me that had DG adopted a radically stylised approach Boksburg would probably not have weathered the fickle and choppy seas of criticism. The guy does have some wildly predictive Red Indian soothsayer genes, but I suspect his craft lies less in the ability to predict the future and more in his ability to denude the work of stylistic trickery thereby opening it up to a variety of contemporary interpretations. Viva.
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