Overview

Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse worked at Ponte City, the iconic Johannesburg apartment building and Africa’s tallest residential skyscraper, for more than six years. There they photographed its residents and exhaustively documented the building—every door, the view from every window, the image on every television screen. This remarkable body of photographs appears here in counterpoint to an extensive archive of found material and historical documents; a sustained sequence of essays and documentary texts is also integrated into the visual story. In the essays, some of South Africa’s leading scholars and writers explore Ponte City’s unique place in Johannesburg and in the imagination of its citizens. What emerges is a complex portrait of a place shaped by contending projections, a single, unavoidable building seen as refuge and monstrosity, dreamland and dystopia, a lightning rod for a society’s hopes and fears, and always a beacon to navigate by. This long-term project received the Discovery Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles in 2011. The first edition of Ponte City, published by Steidl in 2014 and now out-of-print, was awarded the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2015. In order to reconstitute its story, one must pay close attention to this multitude of voices, disentangling what is true from what is felt or imagined and constitutes a different kind of reality. It is an inevitably polyphonic narrative that Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse offer us here. - Clément Chéroux

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9783958297616

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Born in Cape Town in 1981, Mikhael Subotzky is an artist working across mediums including film, photography, painting and collage. His work is a fractured attempt to place himself in relation to the social, historical and political narratives surrounding him, and combines the directness of social documentary photography with a reconsideration of the photographic medium itself. Subotzky’s work is held in public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tate Modern, London, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and has been exhibited at the Liverpool (2012), Lubumbashi (2013) and Venice (2015) Biennials. He lives and works in Johannesburg. Born in Bath in 1981, Patrick Waterhouse is an artist whose work plays with narrative representation and explores the construction of history and its origins. His projects are often collaborative, shaped by close engagement with his subjects. Waterhouse’s work has been exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., as well as the Lubumbashi (2013) and Liverpool Biennials (2012); it is held in collections including the Guggenheim Museum, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Centre Pompidou, Paris. His latest book is Restricted Images. Made with the Warlpiri of Central Australia (2018).

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