David Goldblatt: Particulars

First edition, first printing. Hardcover. Fine black cloth with title debossed on front cover and spine. Photographs by David Goldblatt. Edited by Mary Reynolds. Text by Ingrid de Kok. Designed by Francois Smit and David Goldblatt. Unpaginated, with 27 five-color (black and white) plates, beautifully printed by Hansa Reproprint on 250 gsm acid free, dioxin-free Job Parilux paper manufactured from chlorine free pulp, from scans made by Ebrahim Ganief of Scan Shop, Cape Town. The binding was hand-sewn by GraphiCraft, Cape Town. 15 x 14 inches. This first printing was limited to 400 trade edition copies. Out of print. Extremely scarce. From David Goldblatt: "My first awareness of a bodily particular that I can recall was of the bulges made by the flattened flesh of my inner thighs as I sat in shorts on a bench at kindergarten. From where I sat my bulges seemed more pronounced than anyone else's and I tried to hide them with my hands. After a time I realized that my inner thighs were no different from others. But it remained an area of the body of which I was especially aware and which, in time in girls, came to have a strong attraction for me. I have never been able to decide whether my sense of people's bodies is something I share with others or whether mine is different or perhaps more acute. Nor am I sure for how long I have had it. What I do know is that it has been with me for a very long time and that it is often intense and 'detailed.' I seem to have an innate propensity which has been fed by life experiences and heightened by the kind of hyper-awareness that photography sometimes enables and demands...In 1975 after working for about five years on a series of portraits of my compatriots in the streets and homes of Soweto and the suburbs of Johannesburg, it seemed natural, almost inevitable, that I should extend what I was doing to an attempt to explore their bodies, or rather, the particulars of their bodies, as affirmations or embodiments of their selves.