The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau chief. Sign up to get it by email.

___

Extreme heat often sends me to art museums — thus my recent afternoon with the photographs of David Goldblatt at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney.

He was a master of capturing the cold fury of South Africa as the country moved through apartheid to its end and aftermath, but the exhibition goes far beyond that, spanning 70 years and featuring around 360 prints, plus archival materials and documentary interviews.

It’s an almost overwhelming meditation not just on race, but also on the way power gets written into the landscape of a nation, from mines to churches, cemeteries and suburbs.

His art ultimately — like good foreign correspondence — connects one country to others.

“His work is quintessentially South African, very specific to a time and place, but there is also a universality to its language,” said Rachel Kent, the M.C.A. curator who spent two years working on the show with Goldblatt, up until his death in June from cancer. “These are shared conversations about very important topics.”

Shared conversations and “borderless stories,” as many of you know, are what The New York Times often prioritizes. We also love to explore the potency of historical images (Exhibit A: China; Exhibit B: the United States).

But Goldblatt’s photography shows how reportage rises into art.

His obituary in The Times quoted Joseph Lelyveld, the former Times executive editor, who reported from South Africa, praising Goldblatt’s journalistic creativity.

During his work for a book “The Transported of KwaNdebele” (1989), which documented the oppressively long commutes of black South Africans living in segregated “homelands,” “David spent weeks riding the buses,” recalled Mr. Lelyveld, “photographing sleeping men by natural light, holding his camera steady with the help of a single string tied to his camera and held taut beneath his foot.”

His most powerful images work regardless of the South African context — the composition, the light and the contrasts all create an emotional response worth exploring.

The details add extra force. There are so many faces that, to my eye, show both the exhaustion that comes with a strict and cruel system of racial categorization, and also the coiled outrage that led to its demise.

“David was one of the greatest photographers of the past 100 years,” said Joao Silva, a Times photographer whose own impressive work during apartheid was featured in the film “The Bang Bang Club.” “His apartheid era work is the measure to which many aspired.”

What followed was more complicated, and perhaps more interesting.

Goldblatt wrote about feeling that he could be more lyrical once the country had achieved democracy. Many of his early prints from the early ’90s are larger and in color.

But not long after that, Goldblatt confronted another harsh truth: The country’s values lingered. Everywhere. In the stark divide dotting the structures and landscapes.

The aftermath — “Apartheid is gone but its half-life cannot be washed away,” he wrote in text that accompanied the exhibit — hit me hardest with a series of images documenting differences in churches. Covering most of a wall were several prints of peaceful Dutch Reformed Churches with new bricks, soaring steeples and beautiful fields all around.

In the bottom left corner of the display was a small rectangular shanty with a tarp for a roof and a small sign: Apostolic Multiracial Church in Zion of S.A.

The message was clear: The power structure endures.

Making it more arresting, none of the church photographs had any people in the frames. They could have been captured anywhere: in Australia, the United States, South America, Europe — wherever inequality resides.

Similarly, his images from 2016, showing the blank walls and campus protests resulting from a student movement to tear down artwork deemed offensive, also pointed to a broader issue: an international retreat from dialogue and democracy.

“It’s not just a reminder of the past,” said Rachel Kent, the M.C.A. curator, referring to the full body of Goldblatt’s work. “It’s a reflection of what’s happening today.”

The exhibition is on view until March 3.

Now here are our stories of the week, from around the world: a few to make you think, a few to make you smile.

As always, please share this newsletter if you like it. Tell your friends to sign up to get it in their inbox every Friday. And join our NYT Australia Facebook group for further discussion.

___

Censoring China’s Internet, for Profit

I was fascinated by this rare behind-the-scenes look at Chinese censorship, especially what China has to teach its censors about the country’s own history so that they are aware of what to keep from others.

It’s complicated work for the low-wage workers in “censorship factories” — even a photo of an empty chair could cause big trouble.

___

Who Deserves the Nod for Best Director?

The Carpetbagger, our column tracking all things Oscar (and other movie awards) is back, gaming out who is likely to be nominated for Best Director.

The mix nominees includes longtime favorites previously ignored (like Spike Lee) and oddballs like Yorgos Lanthimos, who directed “The Favourite.”

___

The Relentlessness of Modern Parenting

In the United States, raising children has become significantly more time-consuming and expensive, amid a sense that opportunity has grown more elusive.

Is it the same in Australia? One local columnist thinks not. I’d say that it’s true that there is less competitive parenting here, but that it still exists and is expanding.

___

Australia Fare Goes to Perth

Besha Rodell ventured west.

She found a restaurant (Millbrook Winery) that grows almost every ingredient on its own land — an experience that led her to explore, she writes, “a truth the food world has grappled with since the early moments of the locavore movement: that to grow and serve the freshest food is a prohibitively expensive undertaking, and that morals, aesthetic preferences and economics don’t always play nicely together.”

Usually only the superrich can experience such a thing. But here it’s more accessible: “That you can eat a meal at Millbrook, one that expresses the specific terroir of this lovely pocket of Western Australia, for as little as $50, is somewhat of a miracle.”

___

Opinion | Selections

• Robert Rubin, the former United States Treasury Secretary, argues that the world needs American and China to cooperate as leaders on global issues like nuclear proliferation.

• David Leonhardt, one of our columnists, ended with year with a plea for more attention to the weather: “The story of climate change in 2018 was complicated — overwhelmingly bad, yet with two reasons for hope.”

• Paul Greenberg calculates what we could do with our money and time if we put our phones down for a year.

___

… And We Recommend

Not all screen time, of course, is created equally. For those moments when you just need to watch something, here’s our January guide to the most interesting new television shows and movies available on Netflix Australia.

We watched the new Marie Kondo series last night and have made plans to do some tidying. Eventually.

Damien Cave is the new Australia bureau chief for The New York Times. He’s covered more than a dozen countries for The Times, including Mexico, Cuba, Iraq and Lebanon. Follow him on Twitter: @damiencave.

Source: Read Full Article