in a timeless world of green grass, crackling fires and roast chicken dinners. Not unlike returning to mad Moscow after a retreat at your cousin’s dascha on the Volga (I’d imagine), a measure of readjustment is necessary.

Jozi can seem scary from a critical distance. As you plummet back into the heart of the beast along her mainline concrete arteries cutting through warehouses, factories, outsize billboards and mouldering minedumps the temptation is to do a quick U-turn and bolt for the hills. But that would be the sissy’s option and committed Jozi fiends know that this city’s magic lies way deeper than her hardened graffitied surfaces.

It’s only when you’re immersed in the hum of the inner organism, bound up in her networks and people that you start to feel at home again. So I start my first morning back with a speedy espresso at the brashly named Two Tarts café in Milpark and make my along the reddening autumn leaves of Jan Smuts to the art strip, where temperatures are rising again with photographer Pieter Hugo and
painter Alfred Thoba at Warren Siebrits, Colbert Mashile at Krut and Ricardo Fornoni, the youngest blood on the block, preparing for his latest show, Anima, at Resolution.

But being an unabashed Goldblatt freak my first destination is the Goodman Gallery. For who can resist a show entitled Joburg by this city’s most duly lauded lensman? Perhaps the most crucial aspect about this exhibition is the extensiveness of its chronogical sweep, offering the viewer an excruciatingly considered insider’s take on the evolution of this metropolis and its people through the latter half of the 20th century right up to this moment.

I’m drawn in from the get go by two moody colour images, both taken on 17th Street Fietas in the late Seventies before the destruction of its houses and shops under the Group Areas Act. In the first image one is struck by the humility and unassuming scale of the early colonial architecture; the tin roofs, peeling pillars and faded stoep paint highlighting the makeshift qualities of the era in relation to the bald capitalist machismo that has informed the construction of some the concrete behemoths photographed by Goldblatt in Sandton in recent years.

The second image captures what was once the landmark Avalon Cinema with its broken neon sign and faded, peeling posters advertising double features… I am struck by the poignant particularity of the colours of this lost and fading world and the fact the images we know from Goldblatt’s early oeuvre are usually in black and white…
Soon enough though I find myself in the thick of an eager throng of flamboyant seniors brought together by art historian Mona Berman and being guided through the works on show by the brilliantly erudite Neil Dundas, the solid rock at the heart of the Goodman. Dundas points out five early colour works, explaining that Goldblatt never exhibited his colour works in the past because of limitations in printing techniques. However with the advent of digital printing, he has been able to work with colour negatives from his archive to achieve the subtlety of hue on which he has steadfastly refused to compromise.
Two of the other five colour prints from the archive were composed in 1977 and feature the makeshift kitchen and dark bedroom of a humble home in Soweto. There is something painfully touching about the plastic covers laid down to protect and preserve the cheap stainless steel and plastic furniture. It’s a small gesture that captures a spirit of pride and optimism against the odds – a human impulse that stands out against other systematic imperatives implicit in the forms of so much of this city’s architecture.
Captured by Goldblatt’s lens the stark shadows of these hulks belie the crass capitalism and nationalism that have prevailed through the reigns of two power-hungry regimes. But the city’s magic shines through in small and poignant human gestures immortalised by Goldblatt, who has never failed to take the time to notice them. And that’s the paradoxical glory of this town really, the everyday human striving pitted against more complex overriding forces hell bent on relentlessly fashioning fresh profits from this rugged Highveld grit.

* David Goldblatt’s Joburg is on show at the Goodman Gallery until 24 May.