In 1986 in an interview with Pavel Büchler for the catalogue for his Serpentine Gallery exhibition, Roger Palmer Precious Metals, in which this work was first exhibited, Palmer talks in detail about the origins of this series and the motivations behind it. The full interview can be accessed here

More recently, in an interview with Duncan Forbes, Palmer has looked back at the series and its political resonance:

"I first visited South Africa in the late apartheid era – a time of intense social unrest and police brutality. British media images inevitably focused on protest marches and accompanying state-sanctioned violence. At the time, the anti-apartheid movement was highly active. As an artist visitor, my attention to South Africa’s politics and landscape would need to be responsible and yet different. I spent a month as a houseguest in a so-called ‘Coloured’ township 300km north of Cape Town. Here and in a nearby abandoned village, I tentatively began to make photographs that reflected my unfamiliarity with the terrain.

Precious Metals was the unexpected product of this visit, my first work made beyond Britain and Ireland. The ten triptychs comprise silver gelatin prints and text panels that invite assessment of indigenous and colonial interactions through references to social structures, flora, fauna and climate. Thirty-five years after making the series, the politics of South Africa may have changed but the problems generated by colonialism are still very much in evidence." The full interview can be accessed here

In discussing his use of word and image, Palmer has spoken about working in "the considerable gap" between the personal work of Richard Long and Hamish Fulton and the more overtly political work of Victor Burgin. Interview with James Hyman 26 June 2024.

We are grateful to Roger Palmer for his assistance in cataloguing this work.