David Goldblatt

In the last two decades football in Britain has made the transition from a peripheral dying sport to the very centre of our popular culture, from an economic basket-case to a booming entertainment industry. What does it mean when football becomes so central to our private and political lives? Has it enriched us or impoverished us? In this sparkling book David Goldblatt argues that no social phenomenon tracks the momentous economic, social and political changes of the post-Thatcherite era in a more illuminating manner than football, and no cultural practice sheds more light on the aspirations and attitudes of our long boom and subsequent bust.

The Olympic Games have become the single greatest festival of a universal and cosmopolitan humanity. Seventeen days of sporting competition watched and followed on every continent and in every country on the planet. Simply, the greatest show on earth. Yet when the modern games were inaugurated in Athens in 1896, the founders thought them a "display of manly virtue", an athletic celebration of the kind of amateur gentleman that would rule the world. How was such a ritual invented? Why did it prosper and how has it been so utterly transformed? In The Games, David Goldblatt - winner of the 2015 William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award - takes on a breathtakingly ambitious search for the answers and brilliantly unravels the complex strands of this history. Beginning with the olympics as a sporting side show at the great Worlds Fairs of the Belle Epoque and transformation into a global media spectacular care of Hollywood and the Nazi party, The Games shows how sport and the olympics been a battlefield in the global Cold War, a defining moment for of epoch social and economic change in host cities and countries, and a theatre of resistance for women and athletes colour once excluded from the show. Illuminated with dazzling vignettes from over a century of olympic completion - this stunningly researched history captures the excitement of sporting brilliance and the kaleidoscopic experience of the Games. It shows us how this sporting spectacle has come to reflect the world we hope to inhabit and the one we actually live in.

The largest retrospective of Goldblatt's work to date and marks the photographer's final project before his death David Goldblatt was internationally renowned for documenting South Africa's people and turbulent history with a quiet determination and unflinching sense of what is right and just, and what is not. Capturing seven decades of his work, David Goldblatt: Photographs 1948-2018 features his compelling portrayal of the rise and dismantling of apartheid. This exhibition includes his striking key black-and-white and colour photographic series, as well as never-before-seen material from his personal archive. This exhibition, exclusive to Sydney, will be the largest retrospective of Goldblatt's work in the region and marks the photographer's final project before his death.

The epic exploration of society, politics, and economics in the twenty-first century through the prism of football, by the critically acclaimed author of The Ball is Round. 'David Goldblatt is not merely the best football historian writing today, he is possibly the best there has ever been' Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times In the twenty-first century football is first. First among sports themselves, but it now commands the allegiance, interest and engagement of more people in more places than any other phenomenon. In the three most populous nations on the earth - China, India and the United States where just twenty years ago football existed on the periphery of society - it has now arrived for good. Nations, peoples and neighbourhoods across the globe imagine and invent themselves through playing and following the game. In The Age of Football, David Goldblatt charts football's global cultural ascent, its economic transformation and deep politicisation, taking in prison football in Uganda and amputee football in Angola, the role of football fans in the Arab Spring, the footballing presidencies of Bolivia's Evo Morales and Turkey's Recep Erdogan, China's declared intention to both host and win the World Cup by 2050, and the FIFA corruption scandal. Following the intersection of the game with money, power and identity, like no previous sports historian, Goldblatt's sweeping story is remarkable in its scope, breathtaking in its depth of knowledge, and is a brilliantly original perspective of the twenty-first century. It is the account of how football has come to define every facet of our social, economic and cultural lives and at what cost, shaping who we think we are and who we want to be.