David Goldblatt spent more than half a century photographing the country he was born into, and the two terms he returned to — dominion, democracy — give this book its title. Published by Steidl with the Centre Pompidou in 2018, David Goldblatt: Structures of Dominion and Democracy runs to 339 pages in hardcover and takes the form of a selective retrospective rather than a complete catalogue.

The selection opens with Goldblatt’s earliest photographic searching, where the habits of attention that would define his working life first appear, and carries through to photographs made late in his career, keyed to a South Africa in continuous change. Between those poles the book gathers many of the series on which his reputation rests — On the Mines, Some Afrikaners, Structures — alongside less familiar bodies of work such as Kas Maine. It also reconstructs how these pictures first reached an international readership, tracing their initial publication in the press.

That attention to print is one of the volume’s distinguishing features. Handmade dummies and working plates are reproduced, so the reader sees how photographs were sequenced, cropped and assembled for the page; bookmaking is shown as part of the photographer’s practice rather than as packaging for it. Essays by Ivor Powell and Karolina Ziębińska-Lewandowska, together with Goldblatt’s own texts, place the work within South African political and cultural history and within the wider history of the medium. Nadine Gordimer’s assessment of his method, reprinted here, describes a photographer who sets aside preconceptions before he photographs; in his pictures, she suggests, no detail stands merely as shorthand for a life.

For a collector, the interest lies less in scarcity than in structure. This is a substantial, carefully assembled book that treats Goldblatt’s publications as part of his work rather than as containers for it, and that sets a long career against the political history it observed. In hardcover and in English, it reads as a considered reference on a central figure in twentieth-century and contemporary photography.