Notes

In the mid 1960s, David Goldblatt began to photograph the dying mines he had grown up amongst, in Randfontein, west of Johannesburg on the so-called West Rand. ‘One after the other, shafts were being sealed and headgears and magnificent steam hoists oxyacetylened for scrap,’ Goldblatt later explained. ‘A compound for black miners became a hospital for the insane. I ranged the length of the Witwatersrand, from Randfontein to Springs, photographing the death of a culture.’¹ Goldblatt published his earliest photos in Optima magazine, in 1968, together with an accompanying text by writer Nadine Gordimer.

While the initial impulse was to record a manmade landscape in the process of being dismantled, Goldblatt was aware that in the goldfields of the far West Rand and the Free State, new mines had opened. In 1969, he began to photograph shaftsinking operations at President Steyn No. 4 Shaft in Welkom. His claustrophobic photographs of men – black and white – working in unison to bore a vertical hole into the earth appeared in Optima that same year. Goldblatt continued to visit this Free State mine into 1970. His debut book, On the Mines (1973), included an expanded section devoted to his action photos of shaftsinking. This informal group portrait of three Free State shaftsinkers captures a rare moment of respite and composure before the start of the gruelling engineering operations, which Goldblatt characterised as ‘an act of supreme audacity’.² As was his manner as a documentary photographer, Goldblatt is attentive here to the circumstances and hierarchies that prevailed in the workplace during apartheid. His portrait records the mandatory white oilers and gumboots worn by the shaftsinkers. A shaftsinking team comprised up to 72 Basotho Machine Men led by two white men, a Sinker and Sinker’s Helper. Their designation as shaftsinkers is important. ‘Shaftsinkers say that theirs is a man’s job, that they could not stand the dull routine of ordinary mining,’ writes Goldblatt. ‘Miners say that shaftsinkers are mad.’³

¹ David Goldblatt (2010) Kith Kin & Khaya, Johannesburg, Goodman Gallery. Page 25.

² David Goldblatt (1973) On The Mines, Cape Town,C. Struik. Unpaginated.

³ Ibid. Unpaginated.

Provenance

Acquired directly from the artist circa 2010 by the current owner.

Exhibited

Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, David Goldblatt/On the Mines/ 2012, 25 October to 21 December 2012.