Mining photographs: David Goldblatt’s On the Mines

David Goldblatt’s photographs in On the Mines create a narrative of the mining industry. They can be read individually as fragmented emblems of the ways that mining has shaped both the city of Johannesburg and its people, and they can also be read in relation to our present perspective as testaments of history. Even in the most seemingly straightforward photographic image, photographs can offer vital metaphors that enhance our understanding of a place. As in the case of Goldblatt’s photographs, these pictures show Johannesburg’s mining-town beginnings, which transcend the specifics of the moment they were taken. They depict the economy and process of extracting gold from the earth, and likewise utilise an exacting economy of vision. His photographs include only essentials, but these photographs go beyond abstract economics to show the humanitarianism of the photographer too. Many of David Goldblatt’s photographs focus on the built environment, the structures of mining, housing and religious buildings. However, Goldblatt is not an architectural photographer. As such, we may speak, as Philip Ursprung evocatively put it, of both “pictures of architecture and the architecture of pictures.” Viewed from the perspective of “the architecture of the picture,” his images speak about Johannesburg’s social, economic and political context. Taken almost 50 years ago, these images have endured because they go beyond documentation. Goldblatt’s incisive vision is mute testimony to the deep critical thinking that he brings to bear in the making of images. As the citation for the 2006 Hasselblad Foundation Award asserts, “almost all of Goldblatt’s photographs have different layers of interpretation through which viewers, according to their experience and previous knowledge, unravel a tale.” This paper will begin by examining the tradition of documenting architectural structures, situating Goldblatt’s work in relation to the techniques and approaches adopted by photographers of architecture in the twentieth century and the meanings that their images convey. Thereafter, a discussion of the layers of interpretation that some of Goldblatt’s images yield will follow.