Close Up: Strangers in our own land

18 August 2015 - 02:03 By Sean O'Toole

Earlier this year two British institutions, the BBC and Rough Guides, voted Johannesburg as their top travel destination for 2015. Tourists mean revenue for Johannesburg, an irredeemably mercantile city - but also, let us not forget, cameras.In a city where personal belongings are a kind of community of property, this begs a question: What will the hastily framed pictures taken by Nervous Neville from Northampton and Anxious Annie from Aylesbury look like?Cape Town-born Graeme Williams, a former news photographer now based in Johannesburg, has ventured a speculative proposal with his award-winning exhibition: A City Refracted.Winner of the Ernest Cole Award, a photo prize managed by UCT Libraries, Williams's fine exhibition attempts to mimic a tourist's response to visiting a foreign country.Functionally, this means that his exhibition, currently on in Cape Town at the UCT Irma Stern Museum until August 22, and due to travel to Durban and Johannesburg, is stocked with "seemingly random" photographs marked by an "untutored, snapshot-quality".In this vein, there is a murky photograph of a man exiting a door, a headless portrait of two women in pink bathing costumes, and lots of blurry images of pedestrians being swallowed by shadow. Hastily viewed, it is easy to mistake A City Refracted as the work of a lucky amateur awarded by some crackpot committee. Williams is anything but, as a patient look at his exhibition and accompanying book reveals.A City Refracted shifts the tired old realist framework used to record the changes racking South Africa's foremost city.Williams, a geologist by training, has been photographing these changes in his own idiosyncratic way since his debut book, The Inner City (2000). His fifth book, also titled A City Refracted, marks a consolidation of his "off" way of documenting post-apartheid life.Huffington Post has named him as one of 10 international street photographers who are "changing the way we see the world".His photographs, which are never mercenary, combine curiosity and emotion with a genuine sense of experimentation.This experiment is also registered in his book's lack of captions. It is for instance impossible to know the place or context of three uniformed men pointing rifles at something out of frame in a nearly all-white photo."The images are not so much about journalistic content as they are part of an accumulative feeling or sense of the area," says Williams, who like David Goldblatt employs a bodyguard when taking photographs in the city.Although a local with deep insider knowledge of the city, Williams says he feels like "a foreigner".Author Leon de Kok extends on this idea in his biographical essay for Williams's book: "Johannesburg is nothing but a place of domesticated strangers."..

There’s never been a more important time to support independent media.

From World War 1 to present-day cosmopolitan South Africa and beyond, the Sunday Times has been a pillar in covering the stories that matter to you.

For just R80 you can become a premium member (digital access) and support a publication that has played an important political and social role in South Africa for over a century of Sundays. You can cancel anytime.

Already subscribed? Sign in below.



Questions or problems? Email helpdesk@timeslive.co.za or call 0860 52 52 00.