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Extreme heat often sends me to art museums — thus my recent afternoon with the photographs of David Goldblatt at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney.

He was a master of capturing the cold fury of South Africa as the country moved through apartheid to its end and aftermath, but the exhibition goes far beyond that, spanning 70 years and featuring around 360 prints, plus archival materials and documentary interviews.

It’s an almost overwhelming meditation not just on race, but also on the way power gets written into the landscape of a nation, from mines to churches, cemeteries and suburbs.