David Goldblatt’s Portraits of Ex-Convicts at the Scenes of their Crimes by Max Campbell, 6 October 2016

In one image from “Ex-Offenders at the Scene of the Crime,” a series by the South African photographer David Goldblatt, we see an older woman named Ellen sitting on a slim bed in a bare-bones room. Her hands are folded in her lap, and her large, deep-set eyes gaze directly into the camera. A caption beneath the portrait informs us: “Here, on his bed, in 2007, Ellen Pakkies strangled her son Abie.”

To make this and the other pictures in his series, Goldblatt, who was born in 1930 and has photographed his native country through the rise, fall, and aftermath of apartheid, connected with ex-offenders through prison-rehabilitation groups. He asked them to return with him to the sites of the murders, rapes, heists, and other felonies for which they were convicted. The resulting images, made between 2008 and 2015 and presented with long captions based on interviews Goldblatt conducted with his subjects, could be considered an unusual contribution to the genre we call crime photography. But Goldblatt’s aim was not to investigate the misdeeds that were committed as much as the humanity of the people who committed them. His practices—which included paying his subjects for participating—were, by his own account, “naïve” and “unscientific.” “I wanted to hear their stories not as a journalist or reformer but simply as the curious recipient of whatever they wanted to tell me of their life,” he writes.

All of Goldblatt’s subjects were either free or out on parole when he took their pictures. Some spoke frankly about their unlawful actions: “When the policeman opened the door, I fired six shots. He fired back. He was hit in the ear,” Paul Tuge, who shot at officers while trying to get away after committing a break in, said. Others maintained that their convictions were wrongful: “The guilty verdict blew us out of the water,” Richi Ellis, who was convicted for his involvement in a murder outside of a night club, told Goldblatt. But all were united in a willingness to revisit the origins of their troubles, and to have their picture taken. Based on her account, we learn that Ellen Pakkies’s son was an addict who had repeatedly robbed her of household items and money to fuel his drug habit, and that this conflict between them mounted until, in desperation, she committed her terrible act. “I pulled the rope,” she recalled. “I cut my hands. I used his sweater to pull tighter.” After she murdered Abie, Pakkies turned herself in immediately. “My tears continued for a year,” she told Goldblatt.

Another subject, Hennie Gerber, joined the South African Police Service at the age of sixteen and served as an officer for eight years, before leaving to work for a private security firm. In Goldblatt’s portrait, we see him standing with his hands in his pockets in front of the wooded area where he tortured and then murdered a black South African man named Samuel Kganakga. According to Gerber’s account, men with AK-47s robbed the security firm’s facility in 1991. Suspecting that Kganakga, who was an employee of the firm at the time, had assisted the robbery from the inside, Gerber, along with four other men, brought him to a gum plantation in Heriotdale to interrogate him. After suspending Kganakga upside down from a tree branch, the men, according to Gerber’s account, shocked his hands and genitals and lit a fire beneath his head to force him to inhale smoke. “During these interrogations alcohol is always used,” Gerber, who testified before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996, said. “No right-thinking person can act in this way without your conscience plaguing you.” After Kganakga tried to escape and was shot in the shoulder by another of the interrogators, Gerber shot him dead and tried to cover up the crime. He was charged and sentenced to twenty years in prison. He served fourteen.

In 2012, having taken many photos of ex-offenders in South Africa, which has long ranked as one of the most crime-ridden countries in the world, Goldblatt was commissioned to photograph a second chapter of his project in England’s Black Country. There he captured ex-offenders who had been convicted of crimes from the grave to the ludicrously petty. (One served six months after disrupting an Oxford-Cambridge boat race as a protest against élitism.) But it is the photos and stories from Goldblatt’s native country, whose scars of violence and oppression he’s devoted a lifetime to chronicling, that offer the most riveting testimony. His project seems to suggest that rehabilitation, whether of a person or of a nation, requires an empathy and inquisitiveness toward even the most monstrous chapters of the past. “Could these people be my children?” Goldblatt has asked. “Could they be you? Or me?”