In pictures: Johannesburg Story

poon cho tang SG

South African photographer Guy Tillim has won this years Oskar Barnack Award with his photo essay entitled Johannesburg Story. The award is given annually to the photographer "whose powers of observation most vividly express man's relationship to his environment."

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His reportage documents the transformation of the town from an urban enclave of the white minority to what he calls an "African town." The fast transformation, steered by the municipal and regional authorities, has left its traumatizing mark.

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Tillim says, "The tenants' story went something like this: in the 1990s the owners absconded, leaving managing agents to retrieve what rents they could. Many of these agents did not pay the utility bills, eventually disappearing with the funds...

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"Windows were broken and not repaired. Lifts froze and their shafts became tips. Communal responsibilities were not marked out and not paid for...

TehJarVu SG

i have been there leh Mr. Green

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"As a consequence the City began chasing unpaid dues, and the buildings started looking like fire hazards to city fathers and developers with an eye on the rents that can be obtained in the bloom of an African City...

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"The tenants have constituted committees to face these threats, to prevent the City foreclosure on utilities, and have with meagre resources attempted to clean up the buildings...

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"They have delayed the inevitable, but their committees have no basis in law and are vulnerable to an onslaught of capital and legal shenanigans that have invoked statutes and non-compliances that carry the penalty of eviction...

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"The question is really whether Johannesburg will revert to being a city of exclusion, or whether opportunities will be taken to include the poor, a condition for the emergence of a great African city."

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Tillims work shows that, irrespective of the changes in imaging technology, the key success factors for the development of the photographic medium are the same as ever: the inquisitiveness of a journalist, persistence and sensitivity as well as an individual style.

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Tillim was born in Johannesburg in 1962 and began his career in photography at the age of 26. The Leica Oskar Barnack Award was first conferred in 1979 to mark the 100th birthday of Oskar Barnack (1879 - 1936).

poon cho tang SG

issit? hows the place? Laughing

TehJarVu SG

rich very rich, poor very poor loh.

city very nice, then you go to the suburb, the slumps look terrible. ppl live in tin shacks, 2mX2m also have.

poon cho tang SG

ic....went to other places in south africa?