In 2010, David Krut Publishing issued Kith, Kin & Khaya: South African Photographs, a 200-page paperback collection of David Goldblatt’s work. The book appeared in conjunction with an exhibition at the Jewish Museum, and it gathers 150 black-and-white plates. An introduction by writer and critic Ingrid Sischy frames the photographs, noting that Goldblatt’s “highly sophisticated, even strict, sense of aesthetics” is inseparable from a “rigorous moral stance about what it means to take somebody’s photograph.”

Goldblatt’s subject is South Africa, but his approach is not documentary in the neutral sense. Sischy describes the photographs as “objects of thought, as much as they’re objects to behold,” and that phrase captures the book’s method: each image is a considered proposition about looking, about proximity and distance, about who is pictured and who is looking. The title’s three terms—kith, kin, khaya—suggest overlapping circles of belonging, friendship, family, and home, and the sequence of plates tests those bonds across a changing country.

For collectors, the volume’s significance lies in its coherence and its context. It is not a miscellany but a carefully shaped body of work, published alongside a major museum exhibition and introduced by a critic known for her attention to photography’s ethical dimensions. The 150 plates are reproduced in black and white, and the 200-page extent gives the sequence room to breathe. The paperback format is modest, but the book’s intellectual ambition is not. Its ISBN—9780986974908—identifies a specific, datable object.

This is a book for readers who care about photography as a form of moral attention. It rewards slow looking and repeated returns. Goldblatt’s South African photographs, gathered here with Sischy’s introduction, remain a standard against which documentary practice can be measured. For a collector of twentieth- and twenty-first-century photography, it is a foundational text, not a trophy.