Strauss & co - 5 June 2017, Johannesburg

268 286 David Goldblatt SOUTH AFRICAN 1930– A Farmworker’s Cottage and a Navigation Beacon for Air Traffic, Groenfontein, Sutherland, Northern Cape, 17 August 2003 signed, dated 17 August 2003 and numbered 2/6 in pencil in the margin digital print image size: 98,5 by 123,5 cm R50 000 – 80 000 David Goldblatt is well known for his austere yet empathetic black-and-white photographs of people and places in apartheid South Africa. Technological advances with colour negative emulsions in the late 1990s prompted him to use colour in his new post-apartheid work. In the early 2000s, Goldblatt initiated a project to photograph the intersection of every latitude and longitude line in South Africa. This photograph, first exhibited at Michael Stevenson Gallery, visually animates an insight he gained during his solitary travels through the Karoo’s apparent nothings: ‘It is deep, bland, vast and seemingly featureless. Yet precisely in these qualities is a presence that is difficult to hold or suggest in photographs.’ 1 1. Michael Stevenson,‘Markers of Presence’, in David Goldblatt, Intersections , Munich: Prestel, 2005, page 105.