ON THE MINES BY DAVID GOLDBLATT AND NADINE GORDIMER, 1973 FIRST EDITION

"ON THE MINES" BY DAVID GOLDBLATT AND NADINE GORDIMER, 1973 FIRST EDITION, HARDCOVER, COMPLETE INTACT DUSTJACKET IN VERY GOOD CONDITIION. PREVIOUS OWNER'S NAME ON FEP.

Goldblatt is renown as a 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. The photographs of the gold mines and surrounding communities engage conceptually with minings 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 barbers chair to the grass sprouting alongside a disused steam hoist, and the details of a General Managers house in the days before its demolition. Goldblatts 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. 

This book is divided into three parts. The Witwatersrand: a time and tailings, Shaftsinking and Mining Men. The first part is a collection of Goldblatts photographs accompanied by an essay by Nobel Laureate, Nadine Gordimer. The second, photographs by Goldblatt with his description of the process of Shaftsinking. The third part is Goldblatts images of men on the mines.I was drawn to photograph the mines not by any metaphor in which they might be seen but by their overwhelming presence in the life and landscape into which I grew. Photography offered both the justification and the medium for greatly extending experience and understandings begun in childhood. From his interview with Jeffery Ladd for Time Magazine.