Description
This limited offer includes Saunders Rock, Cape Town by Pieter Hugo, Tshililo (right) and her friends share a one-roomed apartment in Cape Agulhas, Esselen Street, Hillbrow by Guy Tillim, and Johnny Fortune by Mikhael Subotzky.
These three photographers are hyper-aware of the challenges that the language of documentary photography brings to a fine art context. At various times in their careers, they have embraced, refused and subverted this sensitivity. The three prints in this collection are a snapshot of this conflict.
Tillim’s Tshililo (right) and her friends share a one-roomed apartment in Cape Agulhas, Esselen Street, Hillbrow, is part of a series in which Tillim documented the difficult lives of the residents of Hillbrow, Joburg. The photograph is curious in that the protagonist in the title, Tshililo, is blurry. Tillim refuses the easy rhetoric of the frozen, decisive moment, presenting something wholly harder to read.
Subotzky’s Johnny Fortune is part of his series shot in Pollsmoor prison. There is a moment of unexplained absurdity in this photograph, with the figure wrapped in a towel next to an industrial washing machine. Yet, the prisoner unerringly gazes back at the camera, a theme that has become increasingly prominent in Subotzky’s work.
Saunders Rock, Cape Town is a contemplative portrait from Pieter Hugo. This photograph comes from Hugo’s ongoing interest in the small revealing moments, which he captures with a more tender and self-reflexive eye. This impulse saw it’s most complex fruition in 2013’s ‘Kin’, a wide ranging exploration of his position in South Africa
Pieter Hugo, Saunders Rock, Cape Town
C-print
Image: 27 x 36 cm
Paper: 37 x 46 cm
Edition of 60
Pieter Hugo (b. 1976) is based in Cape Town, South Africa.
Hugo is one of South Africa’s leading photographers. This print forms part of Hugo’s overarching interest in the people and landscape of the African continent, especially those who are marginalised – whether economically so, or through the difficulties they may face due to blindness, albinism, or HIV/AIDS.
Guy Tillim, Tshililo (right) and her friends share a one-roomed apartment in Cape Agulhas, Esselen Street, Hillbrow
Pigment inks on archival cotton rag paper
Image: 35.3 x 52.4 cm
Paper: 42 x 59.4 cm
Edition of 60
Guy Tillim (b. 1962) is based in Cape Town, South Africa.
For his brilliantly observed studies of the life of the often beleaguered residents of Hillbrow, Johannesburg in their decaying and overcrowded environment, Guy won the Leica Oskar Barnack Award 2005, awarded by the Leica Camera Group in collaboration with Rencontres de la Photographie festival held in Arles, France.
Mikhael Subotzky, Johnny Fortune
Pigment inks on archival cotton rag paper
Paper: 56 x 78 cm
Edition of 60
Mikhael Subotzky (b. 1981) is based in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Subotzky’s work in Pollsmoor Prison, in his final year at the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art, led to an extraordinarily engaged series of photographs of life inside that overcrowded institution, ‘Die Vier Hoeke’. This project took place in 2004, where he also worked with the prisoners teaching them to make their own photographs. This image is from that body of work.
