David Goldblatt: Fifty-One Years

At Modern Art Oxford (Formerly MOMA) until 30/03/03

David Goldblatt's photographs document the social, personal and political history of South Africa from the 1950's to the current day. If you didn't like the previous exhibition here, which saw Tracey Emin in all her self-obsessed glory, then the skill and perceptive outlook of Goldblatt will come as a refreshing change.

Themed as photographic essays, black and white images line the walls tracing aspects of everyday life through the struggle of apartheid to the present legacy that it has left. The second-class crowded transport system that black people had to travel in is shown in contrast to ordered rows of cars heading north from Johannesburg to the suburbs of the white middle class. The Shaft-sinking series shows the gritty reality of gold mining and the black labour that whites depended on for their own decadence. But the work is not a moral lecture, no violent protest, just a simple portrayal of the complexity of the era exposing the embedded workings of racism and the resistance of those in opposition to it. The skilfully captured facial expressions of the people in the photographs hint not only at the underlying values of South Africa but also at our perception of it as we are standing in the Gallery.

Black humanity is given respect in a situation where this consideration would have been dangerously radical. These beautiful images seem like windows onto South African lives and show a deep understanding of the human condition. A few recent colour photographs end the exhibition following the changes after almost ten years of freedom from white rule with a barber waiting under an awning for customers in Johannesburg, a stark contrast to the previous photographs as under the conditions of apartheid as he simply wouldn't have been allowed to be there.

It's these changes in history that makes the exhibition so fascinating- the transformation of mindsets would have been unheard of fifty years ago and are as revolutionary as when Christopher Columbus found that the world is round. Seemingly distant from the history of Oxford we can all identify with everyday issues of transport, land ownership, industry and personal relationships. With the current action of land reclamation in Zimbabwe by Mugabe's Government, these photographs have provoked in-depth conversations about human rights and institutional enforcement of these values.

The gallery is full of photographs with magazines and a film about Goldblatt so there is a lot to take in. But now it's free so you may want to visit more than once. If there is one thing that photography can do well that is to document the world around us and after seeing the changes in Johannesburg I wonder what Oxford will be like in fifty-one years time?

Jane Ricketts 01/02/03 [email protected]