Inner city reality

Published Sep 16, 2015

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I live in Durban and will probably do so as long as I have young children to raise.

But the city of “Jozi” holds a special place in my heart. It is undoubtedly my favourite city in South Africa.

And as I paged through A City Refracted, I realised once again why I love Johannesburg so much.

Having lived in Yeoville and Berea while studying at Wits, I came to know many of the places photographed by Graeme Williams.

Rockey Street was our playground, the Market Theatre was our domain.

Getting to know the inner city of Jozi happened in my late teens and early twenties – it shaped me, moulded my character as I grew into adulthood and exposed me to so much more than I ever anticipated.

Williams has worked on “highly personal photographic essays reflecting my response to South Africa’s complex evolution” for 30 years.

Having worked for Afrapix, Reuters and other news agencies, Williams is an accomplished photo journalist.

Now he concentrates on producing “contemporary bodies of work” that reflect South Africa.

From Johannesburg, New York, Paris and London, Williams has staged solo exhibitions around the world.

His latest exhibition, As the Grass Grows, is in London. Its subject is the Born-frees of South Africa.

For Williams, A City Refracted is a culmination of three-and-a-half years of walking through the inner city – most times with bodyguards – and trying to capture the character of an essentially ugly city that still has a beauty that can often not be adequately explained.

“I wanted to show through my photos a sense that people have made it (the inner city) their own,” says Williams.

“My photos tread a line between reality and finding the beauty in the city.”

It is at first disconcerting to page through a book of photos with no captions to ground them, but as you go through each photo a rhythm sets in with every turn of the page.

“I was attempting to find a lyrical approach to photography,” Williams says.

In this book, photographs have been carefully ordered so that images “play off each other”.

“I was interested in creating a flow with the images. Their connections are subtle – it may just be a shape or gesture or feeling that links a group of photos.

“I attempt to move away from giving the viewer a step-by-step account of what I am doing.”

An absence of captions is a technique employed to add to this effect. “The lack of words is deliberate. I wanted to create a feeling rather than make a statement of observation.”

For Williams, this was a means of depicting the reality of inner city Johannesburg life, but also doing so in a “softer way” so that the beauty of the place comes through.

“People work against odds to create homes in this place,” says Williams. “They extract beauty for themselves despite the harshness.”

At the end of the book, Williams has added an essay by Leon de Kock.

It seems an odd place to finally find words, but reading the essay helps pull the photographs together and allows the viewer to concretise feelings they may have experienced while paging through the book.

“I didn’t want my book to have a formal structure. I wanted people to view the pictures without forming judgements,” Williams says.

The essay at the end is by a man who grew up in the apartheid era in the inner city itself.

De Kock talks of growing up in Mayfair – an area inhabited predominantly by Lebanese.

Since then it has moved to being predominantly Indian Muslim and now Somali Muslim.

While De Kock speaks specifically of this area, his

“text captures the broad shifts that the inner city has gone through”.

De Kock’s personal account of inner city life and his observations pull the photographs together. It grounds the book in history as well as the personal.

This is a book I can spend hours paging through. It simply reinforces my fascination with a city I love.

Images from the book, A City Refracted, were taken within the inner city of Johannesburg between 2012 and 2015. The absence of captions was a deliberate tool.

* An exhibition of the pictures from A City Refracted is on at the KZNSA until September 27.

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