Goldblatt’s images spoke eloquently of South African community values. “I’m not particularly interested in photographing [events but] in the conditions that give rise to events … There was this almost naked fear of The Black. And yet at the same time, there was an intimacy with blacks that far transcended the intimacy that I knew in my own home, with my parents.”
The re-evaluation of Lee Miller continues. Art history remembers her as a model to Man Ray. However, the posthumous discovery of her photographic work makes clear that she was much more. Her early work explored surrealism, followed by photojournalism in WWII and, after that, fashion photography. She reportedly said, “I looked like an angel, but I was a fiend inside”.
Dorothea Lange was not an obvious candidate to trailblaze documentary photography. She was an upmarket portrait photographer before taking government assignments during the Depression. Her images were sensationally powerful and now form part of America’s visual history. “A camera is a tool,” she once said, “for learning how to see without a camera.”