Giving Compass' Take:

• Daniele Selby and Olivia Kestin discuss the photography of David Goldblatt, who recorded the day-to-day life of South Africans under apartheid. 

• How do projects like this inform contemporaries and historians? How can funders support work of this type? 

• Learn about a modern photographer documenting the lives of refugees. 

Celebrated South African photographer David Goldblatt took up photography in 1948, the same year the all-white National Party came into power and apartheid began in his country.

Though Goldblatt, pictured above, was just 18 at the time, documenting the impact of apartheid — the government-implemented system of racial segregation in South Africa — would become his life-long mission.

Goldblatt turned away from trying to photograph major moments and instead looked to document normal life under a not-so-normal system. Many of his images show the relationship between white and black South Africans. His work often captured the dynamic between those who owned the land and those who worked it.

Most of these places were harsh, in the landscape and in the standard of living – harsh, too, in terms of the relationships between the white owners and the black servants who lived on the plots. Many [owners] were deeply racist. They had a profound fear of black people. At the same time, they had a relationship with them on their plots that was intimate and affectionate, generous to a degree that surpassed what I knew from my middle-class urban life.

Read the full article about depicting apartheid by Daniele Selby and Olivia Kestin at Global Citizen.