Woman smoking, Fordsburg, Johannesburg (From the particulars serie)

From 1964 until the early 1990s, David Goldblatt built a vast photographic testimony of the social and cultural structures of complex South-African society under the Apartheid regime and, subsequently, under the new social order that emerged in the country. The series ‘Particulars’ focuses on a set of close-ups of gestures and attitudes of various women before a photographic camera. ‘Particulars’ questions the traditional role of the portrait, reducing it to the body language details of each photographed subject that nevertheless suggest their personal characteristics and circumstances.