David Goldblatt was born in 1930 in Randfontein, South Africa, and since the early 1960s he has devoted all of his time to photography. In 1989 Goldblatt founded the Market Photography Workshop in Johannesburg, with, he explains “the object of teaching visual literacy and photographic skills to young people, with particular emphasis on those disadvantaged by apartheid."

In 1998 he was the first South African to be given a one-person exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Goldblatt received an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts at the University of Cape Town in 2001. The same year a retrospective exhibition of his work, David Goldblatt Fifty-One Years, began a tour of galleries and museums around the world, travelling to New York, Barcelona, Rotterdam, Lisbon, Oxford, Brussels, Munich and Johannesburg.

He was one of the few South African artists to exhibit at Documenta 11 (2002) and Documenta 12 (2007) in Kassel, Germany. Goldblatt received an Honorary Doctorate of Literature from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2008.

He recently held solo exhibitions at the Jewish Museum (which travels to the South African Jewish Museum in October this year) and the New Museum, both in New York and is currently exhibiting alongside photographers such as Walker Evans and Bruce Nauman in The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today at MOMA.

Goldblatt’s photographs are in the collections of the South African National Gallery, Cape Town; the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and MoMA. He has published several books of his work. Goldblatt is the recipient of the 2006 Hasselblad award, the 2009 Henri Cartier-Bresson Award and was recently announced the 2010 Lucie Award Lifetime Achievement Honoree.

This lecture is presented in part by SFMOMA. Generous support for the Larry Sultan Visiting Artist Program is provided by the Pilara Foundation / Pier 24 and Randi & Bob Fisher. Additional support by the Black Dog Private Foundation.