Published by C. Struik in 1973, David Goldblatt’s *On the mines* examines South Africa’s Witwatersrand gold-mining industry through artistic photography. The book is rooted in a particular industrial landscape, but its subject is also social: the mines’ workers, institutions, spaces, and unequal relations of power. Goldblatt’s attention extends beyond the spectacle of extraction to the human and built environments that made the industry possible.

The project is especially significant for the way it places observation and structure at the centre of its account. Rather than treating mining as an abstract economic force, Goldblatt photographs the world organised around it, making the industry legible through people, workplaces, and the physical settings of labour. Contemporary descriptions identify the book as a collaboration with the South African writer Nadine Gordimer, and as a work concerned with Johannesburg’s founding gold-mining industry. That literary association helps situate the volume within a broader tradition of politically alert South African documentary practice, while the photographs retain their own measured, visual authority.

For collectors, this 128-page English-language hardcover is an important early book in Goldblatt’s sustained examination of South African society. Its landscape format and substantial scope support reading it as a constructed photographic work rather than merely a portfolio of mine images. The book deserves attention not because of unsupported claims about scarcity or market status, but because its subject, authorship, and historical setting converge with unusual clarity: it is a focused record of an industry that shaped the Witwatersrand and a disciplined study of the people and systems bound to it.