The Corner House is a coincidence of Goldblatt’s first subject, the city of Johannesburg, and his most enduring, structures. In the former, he found a contradictory pull: “Joburg is an ugly place; it’s brutal, but it has an electricity,” he said of his city. In the latter, he recognised concrete expressions of dominion, assertions of political and commercial power, of national idealism, made material in buildings and monuments. The titular head office in this photograph, commissioned at the turn of the 20th century by the mining financiers Hermann Eckstein, Julius Wernher and Alfred Beit, epitomised the immense wealth of the Witwatersrand’s Randlords at the time of its construction, their fortunes founded on and sustained by the exploitation of black workers. In Goldblatt’s study, the edifice’s striking symmetry is undermined by his framing, its copper-plated dome wholly excluded. Instead, a façade of impenetrable stone and blind windows; a small fragment of white sky. Not so much majestic, as the architects intended, as forbidding. Here, the human subject is notably absent but for two small blurs dwarfed beneath capitalism’s brick-and-mortar image.