Artist David Goldblatt will discuss his forty-year body of work documenting South Africa with the New Museum Chief Curator Richard Flood.

Over the last fifty years, David Goldblatt has documented the complexities and contradictions of South African society. His photographs capture the social and moral value systems that governed the tumultuous history of his country’s segregationist policies and continue to influence its changing political landscape. Goldblatt began photographing professionally in the early 1960s, focusing on the effects of the National Party’s legislation of apartheid. The son of Jewish Lithuanian parents who fled to South Africa to escape religious persecution, Goldblatt was forced into a peculiar situation, being at once a white man in a racially segregated society and a member of a religious minority with a sense of otherness. He used the camera to capture the true face of apartheid as his way of coping with horrifying realities and making his voice heard. Goldblatt did not try to capture iconic images, nor did he use the camera as a tool to entice revolution through propaganda. Instead, he reveals a much more complex portrait, including the intricacies and banalities of daily life in all aspects of society. Whether showing the plight of black communities, the culture of the Afrikaner nationalists, the comfort of white suburbanites, or the architectural landscape, Goldblatt’s photographs are an intimate portrayal of a culture plagued by injustice.

“Intersections Intersected: The Photography of David Goldblatt” is organized by Fundação de Serralves, Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal and presented by the New Museum, New York.
The exhibition is curated by Ulrich Loock, Curator, Fundação de Serralves, Museu de Arte Contemporânea. Its presentation at the New Museum is organized by Richard Flood, Chief Curator, New Museum. 
Major support is made possible by the Robert Mapplethorpe Photography Fund.

Richard Flood was appointed in September 2005 as Chief Curator of the New Museum, where he oversees all programming at the museum in conjunction with the Director. Flood came to the New Museum from the Walker Art Center, where he was the Chief Curator for nine years and subsequently the Deputy Director and Chief Curator for two years. At the Walker, he organized a number of well-received exhibitions, including “Brilliant!: New Art from London,” “Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962-1972,” “Robert Gober: Sculpture + Drawing,” and an exhibition of the works of Sigmar Polke, among others. Flood previously served as the Director of Barbara Gladstone Gallery, Curator at P.S.1, and Managing Editor of Artforum magazine.