Travel around the world with Guy Tillim’s The street that you’re on, the same one you know

Stevenson Johannesburg is currently featuring a new survey exhibition by renowned South African photographer Guy Tillim. Oddly, given his global stature and reputation as one of the country’s foremost documentary photographers, on a par with the work of David Goldblatt, this is the first time he has held a solo show at Stevenson’s Parktown North, Johannesburg gallery.

Tillim began his career with the legendary Afrapix agency in the late 1980s, alongside peers like Goldblatt and Omar Badsha. His stint at the agency was purely photojournalistic, focused on documenting the last years of apartheid’s oppression and the uprising against it. His post-Afrapix work was characterised by urban street photography, usually in other conflict zones around Africa. This work commenced with some magisterial work documenting Johannesburg in its immediate postapartheid incarnation, when things were perhaps more hopeful for the city than they have since become.

Later he began to combine this classical documentary approach with a more impressionistic, more clearly compositional approach, in both black and white and colour palettes. A famous body of work in 2004 comprising portraits of the Mai Mai militia in the DRC, including their child soldiers, exemplified this approach and brought deserved international attention and acclaim. Many of these took a subtler, more observational and subject-centric portraiture approach, as opposed to foregrounding the horrific political and military conflicts that were never far from the background.

The current body of work, The Street That You’re On, The Same One You Know, is a partial survey, drawn from different, more recent photoessays in different cities around the world, spanning Accra, Dakar, Maputo, Cagliari, Harare, Dares Salaam, Berlin and São Paulo, from 2007 to 2022.

The images, in both colour and black and white, are at times cinematic, as Tillim captures a street scene that seems to have a narrative just outside the frame. In others they are reminiscent of the golden age of European and US street photography in the 1940s and 1950s, where the likes of Diane Arbus and Walker Evans documented the phenomenon of urban experience itself. This was still such a novel and future-orientated concept then, and capturing it was the photographer’s goal.

Tillim’s images of this kind in this collection are at times conventionally constructed — an image of a woman in a bright orange shirt and headdress is constructed around her central position in the frame, as the cityscape seems to recede around her. But in others Tillim lets the harsh natural light of his African cityscapes in particular act as a character in the narratives of his frames, forcing constant movement out and away by the people being photographed.

The images do not always document, never providing an easy sense of character to the city that inspires their composition. Tillim’s innovation here is often to shoot his frames quite vertiginously, as if the photographer is standing too close to his subjects or is too much embedded in the cityscapes he documents. There is no easy distancing for the viewer, no comfortable visual organisation into focal point and perspective. Tillim’s documents are thus seductive but somehow still intrusive — they are ‘far away but so close’. His participation in the creation of the image is never in doubt, his view of these variously non-first-world cities around the world is not that of a detached and privileged third party observer.

His first showing in his long-term gallery in Johannesburg is criminally overdue.

Guy Tillim — The street that you’re on, the same one you know.

Stevenson Johannesburg

Until June 30.