The making of the zama zama series: the etching process using copper sulphate and salt solution: Reclaiming Crown Mines II

The process of making these six etchings felt analogous to mining for images. The stages required re-drawing and etching the plates over several weeks, as the original images lifted through the corrosion of the mixture. It was painstaking, frustrating, and extremely disappointing, as I had to really ‘mine' for the image to reappear after losing them in the etching process. I persisted over many weeks. During that period, I was listening to and reading the news about the “smoking” and starving the Stillfontein miners out of the shafts to the surface, so they could be arrested for “justice to be served” for illegal mining.

My photograph of Crown Mines

Afterword:

After the fire, in a box of my late mother’s papers, I uncovered a story by my grandfather Richard Feldman, called “Carbide Ash”, written in the 1930, about the exploitation of the miners. The cycle of recovery has been uncanny in its repetition.