Toxic Legacies: Resource Extraction in South Africa

A black-and-white photograph of two young men standing on the street, leaning on either side of a slender pole. A large image of a man in a worker’s uniform is visible on the wall behind them, alongside other imagery or advertisements.

David Goldblatt, Young men and a labour-recruitment poster for the mines, Transkei, 1975. Carbon ink print. Yale University Art Gallery, Purchased with a gift from Jane P. Watkins, M.P.H. 1979; with the Leonard C. Hanna, Jr., Class of 1913, Fund; and with support from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. © David Goldblatt 

Judy Ditner, the Richard Benson Associate Curator of Photography and Digital Media, leads a discussion of David Goldblatt’s photographs of extractive mining in South Africa. In the 1960s and ’70s, Goldblatt documented the dangerous working conditions facing the predominantly Black labor force in the country’s gold and platinum mines. Decades later, the photographer found similar manifestations of inequality while recording the toxic legacy of asbestos mining and its disproportionate impact on Black communities. The talk explores the processes and consequences of the mining industry and their lasting physical and environmental harms.  

Offered in conjunction with the exhibition David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive. Exhibition co-organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and the Yale University Art Gallery, in collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid.  

Meet by the central column in the Gallery lobby. Space is limited.