The winners of the Arts and Culture Trust (ACT) Awards were announced on Friday 6 November 2009. The awards evening was held in the L’Incontro Ballroom of the five-star Michelangelo Hotel in Johannesburg.

The ACT Visual Art Lifetime Achievement Award, sponsored by The Vodacom Foundation, was awarded to renowned South African photographer David Goldblatt. The award was accepted by his wife, who joked that her husband was so passionate about his craft that he could not be there to accept the award because he was out in the field taking photographs.

For more than five decades, David’s photographs have documented the details of South African life. He began photographing in 1948 and has documented developments in South Africa through the period of Apartheid to the present. In 1987 David received a Hallmark Fellowship at the Aspen Conference in Design in Colorado; in 1992 he received a Gahan Fellowship in Photography at Harvard University; in 1995 he received the Camera Austria Prize; in 2001 he was given an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from University of Cape Town; in 2006 he received the Hasselblad Award in Photography from the Hasselblad Foundation; and in 2007 he received an Honorary Doctorate of Literature from the University of the Witwatersrand. He founded the Market Photography Workshop in 1989 in Johannesburg.

His work is held in major museum collections worldwide, as well as at the Goodman Gallery locally.

For more information, click here.
Sally Fink