An arty afternoon
p. We had a cultured Sunday, browsing a very varied selection of art exhibitions in Oxford. Our first visit was to an exhibition of “David Goldblatt’s”:http://www.southphoto.com/david.htm photographs of 51 years of South African life at “Modern Art Oxford”:http://www.modernartoxford.org.uk/ (née Museum of Modern Art). I’ve seen one or two of his photographs before, but this is a huge exhibition and really shows the range of his art. Although he has clearly always been against apartheid, and angered by injustice, these are subtle photographs. There are no images of riots or violence — the closest we get to an explicit depiction is a photo of a young black man with both arms in plaster after he was assaulted by the police — but nevertheless, the tensions are visible everywhere. A series of pictures taken at road intersections, with crowds of people waiting to cross, show the subtle dynamics of ordinary people enduring South Africa under apartheid.
