PARTICULARS
David Goldblatt

14" x 15", unnumbered pages
black-and-white photographs
2004, Goodman Gallery Editions

From the Publisher:
Last year the Goodman Gallery showed black and white and colour works by David Goldblatt. The show coincided with the launch of Goldblatt’s book Particulars. The Particulars series has been an ongoing project, which spans through the seventies and eighties to present day South Africa. Goldblatt portrays particular fragments and details of bodies in both public and private spaces. Here he has reveled in the very contrasting light of the Highveld. He says, ‘There is nothing to beat the excitement of a black and white print coming out of a fixer. I seem to have an almost visceral relationship with black and white negatives.’

David has written the following excerpt in his book: “My first awareness of a bodily particular that I can recall was of the bulges made by the flattened flesh of my inner thighs as I sat in shorts on a bench at kindergarten. From where I sat my bulges seemed more pronounced than anyone else’s and I tried to hide them with my hands. After a time I realized that my inner thighs were no different from others. But it remained an area of the body of which I was especially aware and which, in time in girls, came to have a strong attraction for me.

I have never been able to decide whether my sense of people’s bodies is something I share with others or whether mine is different or perhaps more acute. Nor am I sure for how long I have had it. What I do know is that it has been with me for a very long time and that it is often intense and ‘detailed’. I seem to have an innate propensity which has been fed by life experiences and heightened by the kind of hyper-awareness that photography sometimes enables and demands. Of my life experiences one that was crucial in this regard was that of working in my father’s shop in Randfontein, where I acquired an awareness of bodily particulars that was technical rather than subjective.

My father was a men’s outfitter whose ability to intuit and remember and satisfy his customers’ needs was almost legendary among them. The wife of a miner who had once worked on Randfontein Estates and who was now on a property in the bush hundreds of miles away, might phone him and say, Eli our daughter’s getting married and Tom needs a new suit and a shirt, tie, shoes and socks to go with it. That was all she needed to say. Within hours an outfit would be in the post to him, trousers altered to fit sizes, colours and style unerringly right for the man, his tastes and the occasion.

Even though I did not approach my father’s professionalism, under his kindly yet firm guidance I became reasonably skilled in applying some of his precepts. One of which was never, ever to ask a customer his size. It was our job to know or to discover the right size and to sell him clothing that fitted, that appealed to his tastes and that was right for his purposes. Thus it was that I learnt to be conscious of how a man’s body ‘was’: of how he stood and was proportioned; to estimate and measure the girth and length of trunk, arms and legs so that they could be brought into a proper congruity with jackets and trousers; and as well to understand likings and needs and how these might best be satisfied. I learnt to look at a man and his feet, their length, breadth and build and to judge what shoe size, fitting, make and last to try on him in order to find what would best suit and fit him. I could examine neck and arm and make a pretty good guess as to collar size and sleeve length before confirming with the tape measure. After my father’s death in 1962 I sold the business and became a photographer. The outfitting skills have rusted, but that awareness of the body, of its proportions, size and build and of the tastes declared in its clothing and ornamentation, has, if anything, become sharper – and broader, since I am as conscious of these things in women as I am in men.

In 1975 after working for about five years on a series of portraits of my compatriots in the streets and homes of Soweto and the suburbs of Johannesburg, it seemed natural, almost inevitable, that I should extend what I was doing to an attempt to explore their bodies, or rather, the particulars of their bodies, as affirmations or embodiments of their selves. And so I came to these photographs and an expression of the awareness that has been with me for so long.”

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The Particulars book is published as a deluxe edition of 100 collector’s copies and 400 standard copies.
The cost of the trade edition is $275.00.
The deluxe edition, which comes in a slipcase with an original, editioned, signed and numbered photograph is $350.00.
Shipping and handling not included.

Rencontres d’Arles Book Award

The Goodman Gallery is proud to announce that the photographer David Goldblatt has just recently received the prestigious ‘Rencontres d’Arles Book Award’ for his book ‘Particulars’ which was published in 2003 by Goodman Gallery Editions and printed by the Scan Shop in Cape Town. The book award is one of five categories for the competition that was established in 2002. It has become the focal point of the annual Rencontres d’Arles festival. It is sponsored entirely by the Dakota Group. David is even more proud of this award as it was judged by an international panel comprising of world renowned photographers who have affirmed and celebrate his international status.

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