For the General Manager after he had been underground first appeared in Goldblatt’s On the Mines (1973), a photobook compiled in collaboration with the writer Nadine Gordimer. The book considers not only the high drama of the industry, the men at work and looming machinery, but the minutiae of life in the mining compounds. Both Goldblatt and Gordimer grew up in gold mining country – then the Transvaal – and shared a lasting preoccupation with the images and implications of mining on the landscape and its people. In The Witwatersrand: A Time and Tailings, Gordimer’s contribution to the photobook, she writes: 

In 1886 there began gold mining operations that were to produce great riches and political and economic power that would outlive the deposits of ore and the individual lives of successive generations of men who mined it. There also began a way of life shaped by the nature of the work to be done, the relationship of the strangers who came together to do it, and the blankness of the place on earth where they found themselves. 

For the General Manager after he had been underground shows the bathroom of the General Manager of the New Kleinfontein Gold Mine, who, on returning from work, would take two successive baths (one ‘dirty’, the other ‘clean’) to wash himself of the clinging dust. The black miners who laboured under his authority had no such luxuries, only the most rudimentary of ablutions.