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Climbing into kibbles at the shaft-head, the shift gets ready to go down. President Steyn No.4 shaft, Welkom, Orange Free State. 1969
David Goldblatt
Artwork 1969
David Goldblatt’s monochrome photograph ‘Climbing into kibbles at the shaft-head, the shift gets ready to go down. President Steyn No.4 shaft, Welkom, Orange Free State. 1969’.
Artwork: David Goldblatt, Climbing into kibbles at the shaft-head, the shift gets ready to go down. President Steyn No.4 shaft, Welkom, Orange Free State. 1969 (1969). Silver gelatine photograph on fibre-based paper, 49.5 x 33.5 cm. Private collection.
Artist David Goldblatt Title Climbing into kibbles at the shaft-head, the shift gets ready to go down. President Steyn No.4 shaft, Welkom, Orange Free State. 1969 Date 1969 Materials Silver gelatin print Dimensions 49.5 x 33.5 cm Edition Edition of 10 Credit Private collection

Climbing into kibbles at the shaft-head, the shift gets ready to go down. President Steyn No.4 shaft, Welkom, Orange Free State is taken from Goldblatt's photobook On the Mines (1973). Both the framed image and the book were included in the exhibition Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook! at A4.

“I was drawn,” the late photographer David Goldblatt wrote, “not to the events of the time but to the quiet and commonplace where nothing ‘happened’ and yet all was contained and immanent.” A preeminent chronicler of South African life under apartheid and after, Goldblatt bore witness to how this life is written on the land, in its structures or their absence. Unconcerned with documenting significant historic moments, his photographs stand outside the events of the time and yet are eloquent of them. Through Goldblatt’s lens, the prosaic reveals a telling poignancy. Even in those images that appear benign, much is latent in them – histories and politics, desires and dread. His photographs are quietly critical reflections on the values and conditions that have shaped the country; those structures both ideological and tangible. Among his most notable photobooks are On the Mines (1973), Some Afrikaners Photographed (1975), In Boksburg (1982), The Structure of Things Then (1998), and Particulars (2003).

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