“When I began taking photographs in 1963 I had no clients. So I occupied myself with things that I knew around me. Having grown up on a mining town and having known many of the mining people in the town, I wanted to look at this more closely. So I started photographing the dying goldmines and that led to other things.” 

David Goldblatt

Mill foundations, tailings wheel and tailings dumps, Witwatersrand Deep, Germiston, Gauteng, 1966

Miner’s bunks in the abandoned Chinese compound, so called because it probably housed indentured Chinese labourers between 1904 and 1910 after which it accommodated Black miners, Simmer and Jack Gold Mine, Germiston, Ekurhuleni, Gauteng, 1965

The last of the bigger rocks has just been dropped into a kibble. Now, with shovels, the team lashes (loads) the small stuff into the kibble. President Steyn No. 4 Shaft, Welkom, Orange Free State, 1969

“I worked in my father’s outfitting shop for about 12 years. In that time I had to serve Afrikaners. I did not particularly like the language or Afrikaners many of whom I had seen were anti-semitic. But working in my father’s shop, I gradually learnt to appreciate the language and began to enjoy it…it has a lovely earthiness and idiom that I began to associate with this place. And many of the people were fine people.”

David Goldblatt

Ella, daughter of Freek and Martjie Marais, in the children’s bedroom, Gamkaskloof, Western Cape, 1967

These photographs are about life in Boksburg, a small-town, middle-class, white community near Johannesburg, in 1979-1980. I come from such a place: Randfontein, on the West Rand, is quite similar to Boksburg, which is on the East Rand. My roots are in places like Randfontein and Boksburg. It was as though I had known Boksburg for a long time yet was discovering it for the first. I stood on street corners, wholly engaged by what I tried to hold of the flow of orderly life. Spaces, roads, lines painted on them, low buildings, sky, veld; the people, white and black, moving in their separate but tangled ways; all to be seen in the sharpness of the Highveld light. Like Randfontein, Boksburg was nondescript and elusive, yet strongly drawn and pungent. It was shaped by white dreams and proprieties. Most pursued the family, social and civic concerns of respectable burghers anywhere, some with compassion, yet all drawn into a seemingly immutable fixity of self-elected, legislated whiteness.

Black South Africans were not of this town. They served it, traded with it, received charity from it, and were ruled, rewarded and punished by its precepts. Some, on occasion, were its privileged guests. But all who went there did so by permit or invitation, never by right. White and Black: locked into a system of manic control and profound immorality. To draw breath there was to be complicit.

That’s how it was and is no longer.

At a meeting of the Voortrekkers, an Afrikaner youth movement, Whitfield, Boksburg, Gauteng, 1979