By 1965, though, the carts, long deplored by the Government, had been destroyed. In 1962, there were thousands of these carts, made from castoff materials from white Johannesburg. Goldblatt explains that this is a ''Cafe-de-Move-On,'' one of the coffee carts that African workers in Johannesburg would visit for tea, lunch, conversation and even, occasionally, a place to sleep. For example, the exhibition opens with an odd structure that appears to have been made out of tin ceiling tiles, corrugated metal and a small wheel. The successes in this show are the mystifying objects that yield to explanation but retain their visual presence. Sometimes, though, the text is just a tidal wave in which the sought-for crucial information drowns. Sometimes the text helps, turning what are cool, uninflected pictures into illustrations of the twisted social relations and hideous inequalities of apartheid. Every photograph is supported by a few hundred words. Many of the pictures cry out for explanation, and their cry is answered with a torrent of text. Unfortunately, all is not contained and immanent in these images. Goldblatt chose to focus on unexceptional objects in South Africa, he once said, because he was drawn ''to the quiet and commonplace, where nothing 'happened' and yet all was contained and immanent.'' Instead, he practices a kind of social iconography, looking for ordinary images that are packed with historical and sociological meaning. But he is not exploring the curious and beautiful variations on a utilitarian theme. Goldblatt is interested in man-made things. Like Bernd and Hilla Becher, who photographed water towers, blast furnaces and other quasi-architectural objects, Mr. The exhibition ''David Goldblatt: Photographs From South Africa'' at the Museum of Modern Art includes 46 pictures of churchs, monuments, shantytowns, apartment houses, graveyards, toilet seats, billboards, hedges and house trimmings: a veritable inventory of South Africa's store of goods, running from 1964 until 1993. But the pictures he made of the nation under apartheid suggest that there was one thing in the rag trade he refused to leave behind: the practice of taking inventory. David Goldblatt sold his family's menswear business in South Africa to become a photographer in 1962.
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