 In 1980, South African photographer David Goldblatt took this photograph of two young girls and an adult leader. They were engaged in some sort of discussion and the girls are, one of them is laughing, the other one is looking up with with pride and expectation to the to the woman who is sharing some sort of story. It seems a completely normal photograph and yet beyond the palm trees in the background just in the corners where we can't see just our frame lies the bizarre unhealthy crazy world of South African 1980s apartheid. This is a photograph taken in a white Sony suburb called Boxburg and what this photograph doesn't show us is the key to why these images are so powerful. How's it? How's it? David Goldblatt had been photographing in the mining towns around Johannesburg of which Boxburg was one for many years since the 1940s at least and he was commissioned to take some photographs of Boxburg which is a town in the mining areas in in Joberg where there is a what the time it was a whites only suburb that there was there were no black people allowed to live there they could come in they could work they could clean houses they could do all the menial things that that ended up being the the the domain of black people at the time and the town was extremely dependent on this this black labor both from it from a physical point of view of doing all the menial jobs but also from a financial point of view so because right under the very feet of these people where the mines the gold mines in Johannesburg which are the richest gold mines in the world so underneath these feet the the black people were breaking their backs in hellish conditions in insane weird Dante-like places treated as second-class citizens by a political ruling class of Africanas now if you were wanting to document this inhumanity of apartheid it might be simple to sort of sit there and go oh well we're going to show all the brutality we're going to show the violence we're going to show the anger we're going to show all that that's that hatred that we should probably feel towards these white people these are presses that is so often in life the situation is far more nuanced than that about four years after this photograph was taken my family and I emigrated to South Africa and instead of turning left when we came out of the the airport in Joberg and heading towards boxburg we turned right and ended up in a suburb called Vaughan Valley which is only about 40 k's away from boxburg aside from that distance there is very little to distinguish between the suburb that we were in and boxburg both at the time were white suburbs the houses looked the same the way people dressed looked the same the schools that I went to and the schools that these children go to are the same they are all government schools and in those days there was a lot of uniformity in South Africa especially in the white areas that the ruling africanas had fashioned a world in their vision it was a vision that was confident it was a vision that had an assurity just as much as you see on the faces of these children in these photographs and of the young adults they are almost rock solid in their belief that what they are doing is totally normal that there is nothing wrong with the world that they live in the world that they inhabit this is how it should be this is how it was always been and this is how it is always going to be but of course those faces of those two young girls at the beginning so happy so confident so looking up to their their adults and their betters for guidance and for security little did they know that of course the very crack the cracks are beginning to show in South Africa the apartheid the facade of apartheid was beginning to crumble and of course eventually it would come crashing down the things that David Goldblatt does not show I think are telling and he only shows us little glimpses of the troubles that were brewing in the townships the the the the underlying current of violence that at this point hadn't really seeped into the white suburbs because at the time adults especially non politically active adults simply looked at what was going on as something happening on the TV something happening elsewhere it didn't really affect us and that's an odd thing to look at especially at this remove where people would say why why would you not be up in arms about apartheid why would you not be raging against the machine to coin a phrase but for a lot of the adults it was just something that happened elsewhere it did not affect them so in David Goldblatt's photographs occasionally you see a police truck zooming past you pay occasionally see an army funeral where boyhood friends have gone up to the border and there was a border war at the time in Angola and they have unfortunately had to bury one of their friends but aside from that you very rarely see anything that suggests in these photographs that there was an undercurrent of tension on violence except occasionally you see it in people's faces you see a little bit of uncertainty you see a little bit of I'm not quite sure written in the lines written behind the irons it would be very easy taking these photographs to paint the africana and in boxburg the people certainly the white people who are being photographed are predominantly africans as a caracature as a pantomime villain and and that I feel would be lessening so much of the of the of what makes these photographs work because it would be easy to dismiss a pantomime villain but by painting these people in their banality in their extreme ordinariness that he's saying to us look you know these people they are just like you there is no difference between you and them this could have been you and certainly from my own experiences living and growing up in South Africa as a child who looked towards my elders who looked towards the teachers who listened and did not question the teachers because hey you know we're nine and ten eleven twelve you know years old with we are not politically aware people we didn't question any of it it never raised even a half a comment you know it was it was that so unremarkably ordinary now I know when I've said I've said something like that in the past about another video that these photographs they are they are difficult they are difficult for me to look at because I am now as an adult and more socially aware so more politically aware and now more fully formed if you will in terms of you know sort of my opinions about these things I look at them and I see what David Goblak was seeing that there's kind of this this this terrible you know sort of yeah there's this terrible way that people just accepted the the the brutalities of of a part of the humanities of it as just normal and and I of course I did too at the time not through any sort of desire to be but that's just the way it was and and I also feel conflicted strongly conflicted because I look at these photographs and I feel nostalgic because I see the man pushing the lawn mower with his you know outside of his house and that is the suburb is not what's not the actual server but that is it looks near as damn it the suburb that I grew up in that is my childhood on these photographs and they're held up as something that is for what was and still is for a lot of people a very hurtful and a very difficult and upsetting time in their lives to think about David Goblak photographed all of these images and all the other sort of documentary photography that he did in black and white because he felt that he didn't want to give apartheid any sort of beauty to take the edges off this this that inhumanity that the the the bizarre way that everything just certainly for the white people just felt so normal those photographs of boxburg taken in the 1980s paint such a stark picture of how for the white ruling people in South Africa that that period of apartheid was that it was full of confidence it was full of prosperity it was full of an understanding or belief an unshakable belief that they were right you only have to look at the faces of those girls and of that that woman as they sit there on that neatly trimmed lawn the sun shining down and know that 13 years just as those girls were growing up as as they were becoming possibly parents themselves a man called chris honey was assassinated in one of the suburbs of boxburg and he was part of the ANC and that almost almost through South Africa into civil war this nondescript cookie cutter suburb with its plain average people was almost the fuse the touch point for something that could have completely ripped South Africa apart none of that none of those tensions are shown in these photographs none of that is even suggested in this photograph of those girls so when we know when we know that we can see the world that is rushing headlong to water but it's going to destroy all that confidence that is going to shake their beliefs to its very core this is when we understand that not always do we have to see all the things in a photograph obviously to feel its true impact