On the Mines.
Cape Town: C. Struik (Pty) Ltd, 1973.
Price: $1,000.00
About the item
First edition of photographer's first book. 56 b/w photographs. 4to. Publisher's gray cloth, fine, in photographically illustrated dust jacket, lightly shelfworn, with old pen price to front flap.
Item #239483
Goldblatt achieves a masterful balance between pretty abstraction and biting social commentary in his first monograph, a three-part study of the gold mines of his native South Africa. With a 7 pp. essay by compatriot Nadine Gordimer. Goldblatt "has provided one of the broadest and most objective records of the years of apartheid and the birth of the new South Africa" (Parr/Badger II, p. 114).
