On the Mines is a re-designed and expanded version of David Goldblatt’s influential book of 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, which form the basis of On the Mines. The book features an essay on the human and political dimensions of mining in South Africa by Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, whose writing has long influenced Goldblatt. The new version of the book maintains the original three chapters “The Witwatersrand: a Time and Tailings”, “Shaftsinking” and “Mining Men”, but is otherwise completely updated, in Goldblatt’s words, “to expand the view but not to alter the sense of things”. There are thirty-one new mostly unpublished photos including colour images, eleven deleted images, a postscript by Gordimer to her essay, as well as a text by Goldblatt reflecting on his childhood and the 1973 book.?On the Mines is the first of many titles in an ambitious collaboration between the photographer and Steidl that will publish Goldblatt’s life work in a series of re-prints and new books.

"This volume presents Bruce Davidson's personal selections from his lesser-known color archive. Ranging from a period of fifty-six years and counting, these images are representative of the photographer's color career. Assignments from various magazines (Vogue, National Geographic, Life magazine) and commercial projects led him to photograph fashion (early 1960s), the Shah of Iran with his family (1964), keepers of French monuments (1988), the supermodel Kylie Bax (1997), and college cheerleaders (1989). He photographed in India and China, but also at home in New York, in Chicago, and along the Pacific Coast Highway. In 1968, Michelangelo Antonioni invited him to document the making of his film Zabriskie Point. Davidson also continued to pursue personal projects, e.g. photographing the Yiddish writer and Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer (1972-75), the New York City subway (1980), and Katz's Delicatessen (2004). Often staying on in a country after an official assignment, he documented Welsh coalfields, family holidays in Martha's Vineyard, and travelled through Patagonia and Mexico."--