This photograph was exhibited as part of Some Afrikaners Revisited at what was then the Michael Stevenson Gallery in 2006, and published as part of the book of the same name (Umuzi, 2006). The exhibition and book offered an expanded view of a body of work, first published by in 1975 as Some Afrikaners Photographed (Murray Crawford). Goldblatt took the photographs for this essay between 1961 and 1968.

This photograph of a white family walking home from church was originally published in relation to an identically captioned and similarly composed photograph of a black family walking home from church. In the opening essay of Some Afrikaners Revisited (Umuzi, 2006), entitled ‘The anxiety of identity and Some Afrikaners’, Ivor Powell reflects on this doubling:

… in Some Afrikaners Photographed, the issue of race is directly addressed in two identically captioned photographs: An elder of the Dutch Reformed Church walking home with his family after the Sunday Service. Here the mirroring of the two images – in the symmetrical posing of the figures, the formal presentation, the repeated father/mother/daughter family group – draws them as much as the caption does into an inescapable alignment and dialogue, a dialogue that is fraught by the fact that one family is white, the other is coloured.

Both elders are worthies in the Dutch Reformed Church – though not without qualification. What Goldblatt’s caption does not mention is that the coloured elder would have been of the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Sendingkerk, the made-for-non-whites stepchild of the parent church. The coloured elder and his family would not have been allowed to attend services in the church of the white elder. Once such awareness is taken into the gestalt of the photograph, other poignancies of difference emerge: the body language of each group, the ethnic traceries in physique and the different economic indicators in the Sunday-best garb.

This photograph was exhibited as part of Some Afrikaners Revisited at what was then the Michael Stevenson Gallery in 2006, and published as part of the book of the same name (Umuzi, 2006). The exhibition and book offered an expanded view of a body of work, first published by in 1975 as Some Afrikaners Photographed (Murray Crawford). Goldblatt took the photographs for this essay between 1961 and 1968.

In the opening essay of Some Afrikaners Revisited (Umuzi, 2006), entitled ‘The anxiety of identity and Some Afrikaners’, Ivor Powell expands on the sense of landscape evoked by this image:

In the sequence of images that opens the present [2006] volume, landscape is rendered metonymically as a token of the identity of the people who live in it: its thorny, stony expanses, its harsh and emphatic presence establishing an emotional register that is developed in and counterpointed with the human face. In the second image in the book, Monumentkop at Dawn, that of the faithful gathering for a cultural celebration, the land is emphatically the protagonist, enveloping the celebrants in its embrace and washing them in its light … In Goldblatt’s seeing, the land, as the forge in which spirit is shaped, the site of conflict, its melancholy inscribed in its absence, is a constant and pervasive motive force, and as such it questions and subverts the Afrikaner elite’s amnesiac wish perception of the Afrikaner people, highlighting at the same time a familiar ideological conflict – between memory and forgetting.

This photograph was exhibited as part of Some Afrikaners Revisited at what was then the Michael Stevenson Gallery in 2006, and published as part of the book of the same name (Umuzi, 2006). The exhibition and book offered an expanded view of a body of work, first published by in 1975 as Some Afrikaners Photographed (Murray Crawford). In the text that accompanied the 2006 exhibition, Goldblatt offered some insight into how this body of work originally took shape:

Around 1965 I began to think of an extended photographic essay on Afrikaners, something of broader scope than my explorations thus far which, although far beyond my experience, might conceivably become a book. I made contact with people in the arts, professions, business and politics and did some photography there. Whenever I could, I went into the country, seeking out and photographing Afrikaners. At the end of 1966, the beginning of 1967, I went into the Karoo and Western Cape, and made a similar journey the next year, accompanied by Lily. We had a pup tent, sleeping bags and a primus stove, and camped, very often, by the side of the road.

Travelling through vast, sparsely populated parts of the country with my camera became a major part of my life at that time. I think that our landscape is an essential ingredient in any attempt at understanding not just the Afrikaner but all of us here. We have shaped the land and the land has shaped us. Often the land was unforgivingly harsh. Yet, the harsher the landscape the stronger the Afrikaners’ sense of belonging seemed to be. Many of the people whom I met in the course of those trips had a rootedness in the land of which I was very envious. Envious in the sense that I couldn’t claim 300 years of ancestry in this country. Yet, increasingly, I felt viscerally bonded to it.

By 1968 I had assembled quite a substantial body of work. After a decade of deliberations with Sam Haskins and Barney Simon, and many rejections, one thousand copies were finally printed with the support of Murray Crawford in 1975. It didn’t sell. It was remaindered for R2.50.

Goldblatt spoke about this photograph in an interview with M. Neelika Jayawardane that was published in Volume 3 of The Salon http://www.jwtc.org.za/volume_3/neelika_jayawardane.htm in 2010, saying:

Well there’s the squad car … or the policemen in the squad car in sharp focus in the foreground, and in the background is this granite building, and in front of it are a number of people queuing for a bus. And they are blurred, but they are quite clearly white. And so for me, that photograph – at first sight – is one-dimensional. And I don’t like making one-dimensional pictures; I hate them… because you’re judging for the reader how to read the picture. But on second sight, that photograph is not one-dimensional, because those people are, in fact, all white, and it’s us, it’s us, the whites of South Africa sheltering behind the policeman’s gun. And there’s no question that that’s largely what we did. There are very few whites who were prepared to go out from that protective encirclement of the armed forces and deal with black people one to one, as it were.