"This group of 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."
