africa mining

Hardcover. Hatje Cantz, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 84 pages. When David Goldblatt received the world-renowned Hasselblad Award in 2006, he had been making photographs of the South African landscape and culture for more than 50 years. Born in 1930 in a gold-mining town near Johannesburg, his parents were Jewish refugees from Lithuania, and they raised him with an emphasis on tolerance and antiracism. In 1975, at the height of apartheid, Goldblatt explored white nationalist culture in Some Afrikaners Photographed, and in the 80s he observed workers on the Kwandebele-Pretoria bus, many of whom traveled eight hours every day to work and back. His late-90s solo show at New York's Museum of Modern Art focused on architectural work, and showed off Goldblatt's uncanny ability to discover a society through its buildings and landscapes. His photographs of architectural structures revealed the ways that ideology had defined his home country's landscape. No dj issued.

Hardcover. NY, Harcourt Brace , 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Illustrated with 16 pages of black and white photographs, 338 pages. With wry humor and sharp observation, playwright Pifer elegantly mixes memory and research to reconstruct the world of his South African boyhood from 1933 to 1945. Pifer's father, an idealistic mining engineer in search of challenge and stability during the Depression, found it in Africa, but his earnest American egalitarianism soon put him in conflict with Afrikaner mine overseers, and his career under magnate Sir Ernest Oppenheimer stalled. The author deftly evokes his family--"my mother had the freedom of a disobedient daughter"--and the isolation of the desert town of Oranjemund. The book is even more resonant in its snapshots of mid-century Southern Africa: the still-simmering enmity between Afrikaners and the English; the ripples from Hitler's war in what prior to WW I had been the German territory of South West Africa (currently Namibia). Pifer's knowing account of the travails of servants--"the chasm that exists between white mistress and African maid"--still rings true today. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Macmillan, 5th pr., Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Winner of the Newbery Medal, the National Book Award, the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award for Fiction, and an ALA Notable Book. With an African American protagonist, this is a young adult coming of age book set in hills scarred by strip mining. Newbery Medal on front jacket. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Gottingen GR, Steidl, 1st thus, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 180 pages. This edition of On the Mines is a re-designed and expanded version of David Goldblatts influential book published in 1973. Goldblatt grew up in the South African town of Randfontein. which was shaped by the social culture and financial success of the gold mines surrounding it. When these mines started to fail in the mid-sixties Goldblatt began taking photos of them. The book features an essay on the human and political dimensions of mining in South Africa by Nadine Gordimer.