David Goldblatt Randfontein, South Africa, 1930. Lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa. Son of exiled Lithuanian Jews, David Goldblatt started taking photographs on the spur of his experience in South Africa during Apartheid. Part of an ethnic and religious minority, the artist sought to photograph the life of the nation in a manner that could present its complexities without necessarily aestheticizing the violence and misery. Eschewing photographic resources that in any way distance the image from the original atmosphere of the situation portrayed, and documenting the geopolitical relations
that shaped the social structures of the country, his lens is trained on people, environments, and values that have been severely pummeled by a harsh reality but somehow survived. In the Time of AIDS is a series of photographs by Goldblatt on South African landscapes where the red ribbon of the struggle against the virus is recurrently seen, albeit in discreet, precarious, and easily missable forms. This series of landscapes challenges the viewer to find this recurrent symbol in the image, while perhaps realizing in the process just how hidden but indelibly marked AIDS has become in the South-African geography.
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bedsore on the wound of the waters; the martyrs who do not bear witness; the flowers of blood that fade and scatter in the empty wind like the screeches of babbling parrots; an aged life mendaciously smiling, its lips opened by vacated agonies; an aged poverty rotting under the sun, silently: an aged silence bursting with tepid pustules, the awful futility of our raison d'être. At the end of wee hours, on this very fragile earth thickness exceeded in a humiliating way by its grandiose future – the
volcanoes will explode, the naked water will bear away the ripe sun stains and nothing will be left but a tepid bubbling pecked at by sea birds – the beach of dreams and the insane awakenings. Notebook of a Return to My Native Land · Aimé Cesare