much of his dry, direct and luminous colour photographs. He is usually given in his photographs to a kind of ascetic but modulated formal description, a mode of working that produces images that tend to seem detached and isolated. Despite the appearance of detachment, he is anything but distanced from his subjects, as these new works clearly show. These photographs have an emotional clarity, and a formidable sense of intellectual forethought, different from the complicated moral narrative that gave J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace -a novel set in the tension between farm and city, the country and the urban- its creepy, enervating sense of brutal realism. Goldblatt is notorious for studying a subject for years before making up his mind on whether it merits photographic scrutiny. The photographs are never ahistorical. The consistent quality of all his work is its historicity. In every image, he begins with a single challenge: how does one produce an image that allows both photographer and viewer to think historically about a given subject? Despite the fatigue of post¬apartheid chronicles, Goldblatt’s photographic choices are never overarching, generalising, or moralising. He pinpoints and isolates inchoate moments, dissociating the critical gaze from the dependency on the apartheid past. While his photographic vision always apprehends a constantly shifting, evolving landscape, it nevertheless seeks to remind the viewer that even when constructed in the present tense, that landscape has memory. Shacks and the Helen Joseph Women’s Hostel, which was built during apartheid to house female workers, Alexandra Township, Johannesburg. 11 September 2006 is one such image in which the new situation refers back to an earlier situation depicted in The Structure of Things Then of the same hostel without the surrounding shacks. The mode of ceaseless return is not a photographic habit, but instead a method of comparative analysis. Thus, he writes that his work is the apprehension of the South African topography as a kind of magma ‘congealed in the particulars of innumerable structures and not a few ruins… our land is evidence of much of this. Like geological accretions in the cooling crust of the earth, they tell of the long era out of which we have come.’3 This current work poses similar challenges, and thus demands always fresh perspectives in reckoning with the South African environment as an entirely unique specimen of the historical failure of moral imagination. Ecology of fear A city such as Johannesburg exemplifies the brutal asymmetry of the social condition of urban architecture. Its urban environment is marked by sharp contrasts: in the outlying northern suburbs, for example, pleasure palaces are hidden from view by high, electrified fences, a device employed less for privacy than for security. Johannesburg is a microcosm of South Africa as a fortress society. Though apartheid is officially over, social segregation is just as deeply resilient. This is revealed in Johannesburg as a city framed by palpable fear of violence. In the northern suburbs, some streets feel like the Green Zone in Baghdad, with checkpoints ringing neighbourhoods and public roads while private armies and uniformed guards are posted
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everywhere. In Johannesburg, the universal issue that bedevils everyday life centres around issues of safety and security. This feeling of insecurity has spurred its own lexicon of architectural and spatial distortions that have become naturalised within the iconography and structures of urban design, transforming the spatial context of the city into one under siege, what Mike Davis describes as an ecology of fear with regards to Los Angeles. The obverse of this sense of fear, at a superficial glance, obtains in the image of the bustling downtown area which frames the old business district and the surrounding neighbourhood of modernist high rises between Braamfontein and Joubert Park. If the northern suburbs display in their architecture a fortress sensibility, downtown Johannesburg exhibits all the evidence of precariousness and vulnerability. The overcrowded streets are filled with hawkers and hucksters, with petty criminals and violent gangs, and choked with traffic, with minibuses and taxis. Hardly any whites can be found downtown anymore, except those in transit, barricaded in cars for fear of carjacking. The quality of domestic living conditions appears to have lapsed into an almost apocalyptic zone of urgency and desperation. Entire families often share a onebedroom apartment, sometimes subdivided further to accommodate tenants. There is hardly any sense of privacy in these overcrowded buildings. Peopled by poor migrants from the rural areas and economic refugees from surrounding countries such as Mozambique, Congo and Zimbabwe, downtown Johannesburg is marked by its large deficits of social and economic amenities. In the heyday of apartheid, this part of the city was a bustling cosmopolitan hub of activities for white inhabitants. However, since the end of apartheid, after all the juridical constraints of segregation were outlawed, the area was marked by rapid decline in the early 1990s, and by the end of the decade whites had moved out, while poor black migrants without housing moved in. In the ensuing exodus, services normally found in these neighbourhoods began disappearing, as landlords abdicated their responsibility to tenants. The spiral of neglect and apathy accelerated into decay. Riddled with crime, and with an uncontrollable influx of new residents seeking work and shelter, the fine modernist post-war apartment architecture has all been overtaken by both civic neglect and absence of economic investment. This canyon of high rises is the epicentre and subject of Guy Tillim’s mesmerising Jo’Burg photographs. The series takes the approach of a photographer constantly on the move, darting between buildings and apartment complexes, between degraded domestic spaces that reveal the depths of privation: makeshift barbershops and illicit bars where one wall’s surface is papered over with a carpet of tabloid newspaper headlines declaiming on the city as the very landscape of hell and infamy. In the grid of images brought together here, colour photographs full of chiaroscuro effects, the photographer seems to revel, in almost lurid delight, in recording the decrepitude and the primitive conditions of the miserable high-rise towers, many of them with blown out windows, burned out rooms, habita-
TK
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