Established in Johannesburg in 2005, Afronova became the first African gallery to show Malian master photographer Malick Sidibé in 2007 and Mozambican photojournalist Ricardo Rangel in 2008
Tag: Johannesburg
Johannesburg was the late photographer’s home for 50 years. Now, an exhibition at Goodman Gallery, London, charts his nuanced documentation of the city during apartheid and the post-apartheid period
In 2007, Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse began a six-year project about the infamous Johannesburg skyscraper. Now, a new addition to the work focuses on its dystopian core — an almost 200-metre long abyss running up its centre
In the first of a new series focusing on work made in isolation, the South African photographer discusses her collaborative approach to portraiture
“I have still never seen the first work I made as a photographer,” says Sabelo Mangleni, who started his career as a delivery boy for a local photographer in his hometown in Driefontein, four hours drive east of Johannesburg. The photographer he worked for had been asked to shoot a wedding but, unable to attend herself, asked Mangleni to cover it – sending him off with a camera around his neck and a crash course in photography. After the wedding the newlyweds quickly picked out the images they wanted to remember their day with – so quickly, Mangleni never got to see them.
Still, the experience of looking for a good photograph and working with people from within a community, got him hooked, and in 2001 Mangleni moved to Johannesburg and joined the Market Photo Workshop. Set up by renowned documentary photographer David Goldblatt in 1989, this well-respected organisation supported young black photographers during apartheid South Africa.
It was an excellent start in photography, but arriving in Johannesburg, Mangleni felt alienated. “I couldn’t understand what people were saying,” he says, describing the struggle to communicate with people in English, which he was still learning at the time. To avoid speaking, he channelled his feelings into photographs of the buildings and architecture, which lead to his first, and ongoing, series Big City.
“David Goldblatt wanted to remove his judgement from his photography,” says Karolina Ziebinska-Lewandowska, the Centre Pompidou curator who worked on a huge retrospective of Goldblatt’s work, shown at the institution earlier this year.
“He always said that if a photograph serves a certain idea, even if it’s a good idea, the idea always takes precedence and the photography then contains a judgement. He felt that he should record the facts, and leave the judgement to the viewer.”
“The project is about the traces the ‘invisible world’ leaves on our world,” says 36-year-old…