David Goldblatt: Regarding Intersections gathers color photographs made across South Africa between 2002 and 2011, during a decisive late turn in the photographer’s personal practice. Although Goldblatt had used color extensively in his professional work since 1964, he had made almost none of his personal photographs in the medium. The book therefore records not simply a change of palette, but a new way of attending to the country and to the conditions through which its histories become visible.

The project began with a precise geographical proposition: to photograph within 500 meters of each of 122 points where whole degrees of latitude and longitude intersected within South Africa. Goldblatt eventually abandoned that system when it threatened to become an end in itself. He kept, instead, the idea of the intersection as a conceptual instrument. Over nine years of travel, the photographs look for convergences among ideas, values, histories, conflicts, fears, joys, aspirations, and the land that holds them. Johannesburg appears at the outset, but the scope soon widens into a sustained, attentive reading of the country.

That movement from rule to responsiveness is central to the book’s character. Its photographs are not presented as a survey governed by a single formula; they emerge from the friction between an imposed structure and the photographer’s judgment about what is worth seeing. The resulting selection places ordinary sites and broader political and social meanings in close proximity, allowing connections to remain suggestive rather than resolved.

Published by Steidl in 2014, this English-language hardcover brings together a substantial selection from the color work and extends a sequence of related publications: an earlier version, Intersections, appeared in 2005, while Intersections Intersected paired black-and-white and color photographs in a 2008 Serralves Museum catalogue. For collectors, Regarding Intersections deserves attention as a focused account of Goldblatt’s engagement with color, geography, and post-apartheid South Africa—and as a book whose governing idea is tested, revised, and made more complex through looking.