From the shaft bottom, looking up at the stage and a kibble about to pass through it

David Goldblatt is revealed as the great chronicler and documenter of South Africa: the quiet observer of how the country, its peoples, its institutions and landscape have been inscribed by politics and power.

On the Mines is a group of eighty photographs of the gold mines and surrounding communities engage conceptually with mining’s pivotal significance as the driver of the South African economy in the 1960s and 1970s. As an astute and careful observer, both principled and compassionate, Goldblatt strove to capture life in and around the mines in sequences of shaft-sinking, stoping and other primary activities that took place underground, as well as the particularities of those individuals at the rockface. He also captured dispassionately, but not uncritically, the individuals within the corporate stratifications that defined relations on the mines. His lens also documented the pathos of abandoned mines; from a barber’s chair to the grass sprouting alongside a disused steam hoist, and the details of a General Manager’s house in the days before its demolition.

Goldblatt’s earliest boyhood photographs of mining headgear and related structures were an intimation of how this subject would become a major theme in his thinking and work. The series on exhibition was first published by Struik in 1973 with a telling text by Nadine Gordimer, who Goldblatt had deliberately sought out because of her similar experience of growing up on the East Rand of Gauteng surrounded by mines. Goldblatt appreciated Gordimer’s critical understanding of this context, including the hegemony that shaped people’s lives.