David Goldblatt and Consuelo Kanaga, notaries of racism

For almost 70 years David Goldblatt (1930-2018) traveled around South Africa to photograph its people, its landscapes and its architecture. Grandson of Lithuanian Jews who emigrated to the African country to escape the progroms, he suffered firsthand the anti-Semitic hatred and relentless segregation suffered by the black natives, mortified for decades by white and supremacist hatred.

Goldblatt was a witness and notary of ‘apartheid’ and its dissolution with the rise to power of Nelson Mandela. As was Consuelo Kanaga (1894-1978), a pioneer in documenting the way of life of segregated African Americans in the United States since the first third of the 20th century and whose work had not been exhibited before in Europe.

The Mapfre Foundation shows until August 25 the works of these committed, sensitive and appreciated white photographers attentive to the black universe within the framework of PHotoEspaña. “Both flee from spectacularity,” highlights Nadia Arroyo, director of Culture of the foundation.

‘Without ulterior motives’ is the title of Goldblatt’s exhibition, which brings together almost 150 medium and large format images in black and white and color. The South African photographer used that phrase to warn the models he recruited through word-of-mouth ads that he wanted nothing more than to photograph citizens, black or white, in their living or working environments.

‘Catching the spirit’ is the title of Consuelo Kanaga’s exhibition, which brings together 180 images, mostly small-format period prints, and various documentary material. “Kanaga put all her attention on the other, with a language of cultural height that mixes social commitment and art,” says Drew Sawyer, curator of the exhibition of the white photographer who wanted to portray the soul of black people “without norms.” Americans.

Goldblatt photographed police officers, victims of the apartheid regime, dissidents and white settlers with an incorruptible spirit of objectivity. He captured the interior of their homes, the cities in which they lived, their buildings and the landscapes in which they moved. “His images form a broad and moving visual document of the racist regime, a record that never explicitly shows its violence, but clearly shows everything it represented,” says Matthew S. Witkovsky, curator of the exhibition along with Judy Ditner and Lelies. M.Wilson.

Of great documentary strength, Goldblatt’s photos show “the continuity and solidity of his work,” according to the curator. “He deeply believed in the value of exchange, debate and the importance of expressing one’s opinions,” says Witkovsky of the first South African exhibition he exhibited at the MoMA in New York in 1998. Winner of the Hasselblad and Cartier-Bresson prizes, he participated in Documenta 11 and 12 in Kassel and at the 54th Venice Biennale.

The exhibition has been co-organized by The Art Institute of Chicago and the Yale University Art Gallery of New Haven together with the Mapfre Foundation.

Commitment

‘Catching the Spirit’ covers six decades of work by Kanaga, a forgotten but fundamental artist in the history of modern photography. Unconventional, committed to social justice, she was a professional photojournalist since the 1910s and the first photographer hired by the San Francisco Chronicle. She was also one of the few women connected to American avant-garde circles, the ‘f.64’ group in San Francisco, and the ‘Photo League’ in New York. White, born in Oregon, she joined the ‘New Negro’ or ‘Harlem Renaissance’ movement.

«Kanaga did not do documentary street photography. “She wanted to make direct portraits with an artistic desire,” says the curator of the photographer’s first European exhibition. It has been possible thanks to the Brooklyn Museum in New York, repository of Kanaga’s legacy, which lost a good part of its earliest images in its many moves, in collaboration with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Mapfre Foundation. The images of the South African that witnessed ‘apartheid’ and those of the great portraitist of black America coincide in the Mapfre foundation