David Goldblatt began photographing Afrikaner life in 1963, when South Africa’s ruling National Party was tightening its control amid resistance from the country’s Black population. Rather than pursue the visible events of political history, he attended to the ordinary: people, homes, work, and rural surroundings in which, as he understood it, nothing appeared to happen, yet everything remained present and unresolved.

That choice gives Some Afrikaners Photographed its particular force. Goldblatt’s subjects were people he knew through his father’s clothing store, and the photographs hold together his familiarity, ambivalence, and moral unease. They do not reduce Afrikaner society to a single political type. Instead, they register the contradictions of a community whose influence permeated his life: austerity alongside generosity, ordinariness alongside the structures of power that shaped the country around it.

First published in 1975, the work occupies an important place in the history of South African documentary photography. This Steidl publication brings the project back into circulation with an essay by the South African writer Antjie Krog and a contribution by critic Ivor Powell, extending the photographs into questions of class, memory, representation, and the original response to Goldblatt’s portrayal of rural Afrikaners. The book’s significance lies not in spectacle but in sustained attention—its ability to make social and political tension legible through the quiet pressure of accumulated images.

For collectors, this is a consequential photobook because its subject and method are inseparable. Goldblatt’s measured black-and-white documentary approach asks to be read slowly, across relationships rather than isolated icons. Published by Steidl in 2019 as an English-language hardcover, it offers a substantial and carefully contextualized form in which one of the photographer’s earliest major projects can be encountered as an argument about looking, belonging, and complicity.