Guy Tillim’s exhibition at Stevenson Gallery in Johannesburg captures colourful street scenes, post-colonial history in Africa
By Edward Tsumele, CITYLIFE/ARTS Editor
The first thing that you will notice in the Stevenson Johannesburg Gallery where legendary photographer Guy Tillim’s current exhibition is on, is how the subjects of his photography do not seem to be conscious of the presence of this photographer, documenting their lives in the metropolis of mainly African cities.
His photography documenting the lives of ordinary people as they go about their daily lives does not seem to be intruding into their lives. The people he documents, from Johannesburg, Maputo, Harare, to Dakar in Senegal, do not seem to be aware of the photographer in their daily lives. If they do, they seem not to care about what he is doing.
I asked the photographer at the opening of the exhibition The Street that you are on, The same one you know, running from 13 May – 30 June 2023 at Stevenson Gallery, how he manages to achieve such a feat in his photography practice.
“The trick is not to try and hide from the people about whom you are you taking photographs. Make yourself visible and from there everything becomes easy for you and the people. I could easily wave a fag to show them that I am there taking photographs and they would not care,” he told me.
His photographs not only capture the people as they walk in the streets, but the different architectural aesthetics that one finds in mainly African metropolis. In some cities it also becomes clear that there has been ideological changes taking place in society post colonialism by simply for example, looking at the signage on street poles. In some cities through, one still sees vestiges of colonialism as for example, street names still carry names of individuals associated with colonialism in those countries. In that sense, therefore, Tillim’s exhibition is more than just a documentation of streets life in African metropolis, it is also a study of post-colonial politics in those countries covered by this exhibition.
This new body of work by Tillim is the artist’s first exhibition in Parktown North featuring a selection of images from cities and urban spaces spanning Accra, Dakar, Maputo, Cagliari, Harare, Dar Es Salaam, Berlin and São Paulo, dating from 2007 to 2022.
The images in this body of work are in colour and black and white. Some, through Tillim’s treatment of shadow and contrast, possess a cinematic quality while others, seemingly taken in the peak of the midday sun, offer a stark look at the bustle and aridity of different metropolitan environments. Central to this series is the artist’s teasing of the line between fiction and fact.
Despite operating in the register of documentary street photography, the works are precisely edited, retouched and stitched to create a reconstruction of each space. People and interactions are inserted and erased to compose fictitious moments that provide a composite picture of each locale. While remaining attentive to the specificity of each geography, including landmarks and monuments, Tillim reinvents the photographic document into a sensory testament, focalised through his gaze.
The Street That You’re On, The Same One You Know marks the latest chapter in Tillim’s ongoing project of observing place as a signifier for the logics of power, while affirming the dynamism and endurance of the human lives featured.
An extract from Living on the Earth, a 2005 text on the artist’s approach by Renate Wiehager, proves prescient:
“Tillim does not treat [his] series as a closed corpus and historical document, but as elements and compressions in a reading that never comes to an end. For this reason, Tillim is prepared to undertake publication in any form – as an exhibition, as a book, as a selected presentation in a wider context – and will make the effort to ‘reread’ and recontextualize, for individual images and whole series. In other words, he arranges his material in a new way for every public form, creates new neighbourhoods, correspondences and fractures, creates other possible stories from the story material.
Alien ideologies and cultures, other times and opposing value-systems subject each individual photograph to a reading that raises an individual point of view to the status of a standard; Guy Tillim, by permanently rearranging and rereading his material, anticipates the geological faults of a present that never stands still, in a process of interpretation and self-interpretation. In collapsing the aims of his diptychs and triptychs into a single image, Tillim asserts that this body of work is a letting go of the photojournalistic tenets he was trained in and has been bound by, finally doctoring images to facilitate an unobstructed impression of place, movement and power.”{
.The Street that you are on, The same one you know, runs at Stevenson Gallery 46 7th Avenue, Parktown North, 13 May-30 June, 2023.