Photographic Inspirations: David Goldblatt, No. 4 Shaft, President Steyn Gold Mine, 1969

There are many images and books by David Goldblatt I could have chosen to showcase here. He was one of the most important documentary photographers of the late twentieth century, and most of his work was dedicated to recording Apartheid-era South Africa. Like Walker Evans, he worked with a variety of different cameras and with a variety of different approaches, adapting his technique according to the circumstances and purpose.

This image is from a series of photographs Goldblatt took underground in the gold mines of South Africa in the late 60s, working on 35mm film, although he also shot formal portraits of miners and their white supervisors above ground on medium-format during the same period. This body of work was published in 1973 in his book co-authored with the writer Nadine Gordimer, On the Mines. 

The justification for these badly degraded pictures had nothing to do with self-expression. On the contrary. For Goldblatt, the subject was so important as to both render the technical limitations of the pictures trivial by comparison, and to demand an absolute surrender of self. Goldblatt’s struggle with his equipment, which constantly broke down and jammed underground, paid homage to the miners’ struggle with their environment. Although visible blur and grain clearly draw attention to the photograph as an artefact, they are here paradoxically taken as proof that the reality of the mines is so powerful as to overwhelm the camera’s ability to contain it.

A similar tolerance of degradation can be observed in pictures of unique, newsworthy events, such as the famous photograph of Robert Kennedy bleeding to death. In pictures like this, the event violently breaks into the continuity of everyday life, and the degradation of the image mimics that violence. Goldblatt appropriated this rhetoric by treating the everyday realities and routines of work as if they were just as dramatic, heroic and uniquely unrepeatable as the fate of world leaders.

What interests me about Goldblatt's mine photographs is the notion of stepping right up to the edge of incoherence, but without ever stepping over it.