By Mary Corrigall

'I can't say I love it but it is in my blood, under my skin and it makes me itch', observes South African photographer David Goldblatt of his long-standing muse, the traumatized city of Johannesburg. Goldblatt has enjoyed a tempestuous relationship with Joburg since he first sought to record her schizophrenic persona in the 1950s with his camera lens. Back then this conurbation was shaped by apartheid: neighbourhoods were being obliterated and black people were shipped off to the peripheries to make way for a sanitised whites-only city.

Today, the tenacious legacy of apartheid keeps Joburg a divided city, with its newly cobbled streets bearing the names of anti-apartheid political heroes flanked by shiny architectural gems – like the swish loft apartments and art galleries of regenerated Newtown – alongside dilapidated buildings swelling with impoverished inhabitants living without electricity and water. This tension and desperation makes Joburg a compelling muse for artists, and there has been a recent flurry of exhibitions pondering the city: Goldblatt's latest show, Joburg, opened last week at the Goodman Gallery; Reality Check, an exhibition of photography from South Africa is showing at the Iziko National Gallery in Cape Town; and Cities in Crisis, which meditates on urban transformation in South Africa, is now on at the University of Johannesburg. All these exhibitions – as well as those that have come before, like Guy Tillim's Joburg in 2004/2005 – are united by a desire to capture and document this city's marginalised inhabitants and their squalid living conditions, laying bear the unseen, raw detritus of a troubled society.

The revelatory work of Tillim, Goldblatt and a glut of other documentary-style photographers such as Jodi Bieber, Santu Mofokeng, Sabelo Mlangeni and Andrew Tshabangu challenges President Thabo Mbeki's rosey vision of Joburg as 'the golden heartbeat of Africa'. These photographers have found rich source material and great success recording the radical shifts in South African society since the advent of democracy in 1994, while offering social and political commentary on the impact of gentrification. But one has to wonder whether the images that Tillim et al are promulgating of the city's dispossessed are creating a limiting picture of Joburg – a voyeuristic obsession with the aesthetics of poverty, but one with minimal risk and engagement.



David Goldblatt, Mother and Child, Nelson Mandela Square, Sandton 8 March 2005, 2005
Goldblatt's Joburg sees him juxtaposing the Joburg of yesteryear with its present-day incarnation. Goldblatt's lens has often been trained on the architectural characteristics of the city, meditating on the textural and corporeal presence of the concrete monoliths that dominate the landscape. But photographs such as Domestic Worker's Afternoon Off, Sunninghill, 23 July, 1999, which shows a black servant taking a break on the outskirts of an affluent (and predominantly white) neighbourhood, suggests that the sleek, über modern monoliths that colonise Joburg's skyline are a fragile façade, obfuscating more unsightly, immoral realities. Goldblatt implies that while this city is in a state of flux, transforming from a segregated city to an integrated, democratised locale, for many these changes have been peripheral to their existence.


David Goldblatt, The Hillbrow Tower from Quartz Street May 1975, 1975


Cities in Crises echoes this sentiment. From Mikhael Subotsky's aerial views of impoverished townships to Sabelo Mlangeni's images of decrepit, crumbling buildings in the inner city, to Tillim's shots of squalid interiors where the dispossessed live, to Jane Alexander's collaged images of street children's brutal existence, Cities in Crisis also offers a view of Joburg through the eyes of the dejected, the disempowered. This is not the position that any of these artists actually occupy; they are voyeurs, insinuating themselves into these hidden crevices in the city. And it is via their supposedly dispassionate medium that they posit themselves as observers – in the process denying the unbalanced relationship that exists between themselves and their subjects. The matter-of-fact titles that dryly relay the location and date of the photographs substantiate their desire to document rather than project their own agenda onto these scenarios. Revealing these unseen and disregarded realities of Joburg presents these artists the opportunity to reconcile themselves with this parallel realm, and by extension their affluent audiences get that opportunity too. In other words, the hope is that the chasm between these impoverished subjects, the photographers and the audience can be bridged in the moment of viewing.

While these impersonal representations of the disenfranchised are no doubt an attempt to bring those on the periphery to the centre, they also conform to familiar journalistic images of poverty, corruption and violence that have come to be associated with the African continent. They may be more understated depictions, alluding to rather than portraying violence, but nonetheless they're contiguous with imagery of Africa that permeates the visual language of the West.

In contrast to these problematically objective visions of Joburg, a new aesthetic that engages with spatial politics in a more personalised and productive manner has been quietly developing on the fringe. Artists such as Marcus Neustetter, Stephen Hobbs and Ismail Farouk are spearheading this new brand of multi-disciplinary spatial-cum-creative practice. Eschewing an objective approach, these artists immerse themselves in the city's forgotten spaces and often record the messy process of doing just that, rather than creating slick and contemplative finished products. Perhaps the most successful of these projects was Neustetter and Hobbs' UrbaNET - Hillbrow/Dakar/Hillbrow, which showed at the University of Johannesburg gallery last year.

Taking Dakar and Hillbrow, a no-go area of Joburg, as their destinations, the duo plotted paths to those locales using makeshift maps and recording their physical journeys via rough drawings, video artworks and Google maps, all of which offered differing perspectives on the spaces they surveyed. Their political-romantic wandering brings to mind Francis Alÿs's walk along the Green Line in Israel (dripping green paint behind him as he went; SOMETIMES DOING SOMETHING POETIC CAN BECOME POLITICAL AND SOMETIMES DOING SOMETHING POLITICAL CAN BECOME POETIC, 2007). But unlike Alÿs, Hobbs and Neustetter were not enacting a predetermined performance with a clear objective; rather they were attempting to measure, gauge and explore the discrepancies between perception and reality while satisfying a personal desire to integrate and 'know' the 'no-go' spaces they moved through in quite a spontaneous way. Ultimately, Hobbs and Neustetter wanted to depoliticise space, thereby destroying the invisible boundaries that continue to keep this city so divided.

Mary Corrigall is a freelance writer based in Johannesburg. See her previous blog, Africa's First Art Fair Is a South African Affair