https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4522-5054
![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
Abstract
This photographic essay traces the collaboration between an historian and a photographer in a collaborative ‘conversation’ – both visual and textual – as part of a broader project to reimage urban space in Johannesburg, South Africa. Titled JoziQuest, the project locates a series of architectures and heritage sites in the space of the city, and uses digital methods as a critical tool to explore both: through time and space, historical narrative and imagery, text and context. In this pilot phase, structures associated with the architect Hermann Kallenbach have been creatively ‘mapped’ through site visits and photographic recordings of the actual buildings, which exist in variety of conditions and contexts – some restored, others in ruin. Photographing Kallenbach's Johannesburg enabled us to discursively and visually trace these architectures and locations to a time of the city's extraordinary growth into the leading metropolis of the African continent. In drawing on Kallenbach's design work in relation to Walter Benjamin, and as a way of framing my photographic intervention, this visual essay seeks to show that Kallenbach's work can be made to act as a lens of sorts, enabling sets of understandings of the relationship between early Johannesburg and the post-apartheid city in 2018, to emerge.
Cet essai photographique trace la collaboration entre un historien et un photographe dans une ‘conversation’ collaborative – aussi bien visuelle que textuelle – dans le cadre d’un projet plus large pour remettre en images l’espace urbain de Johannesburg, en Afrique du Sud. Intitulé JoziQuest, le projet localise une série de sites architecturaux et patrimoniaux dans l’espace citadin, et utilise comme outil principal des méthodes numériques pour explorer tant, le temps et l’espace, le récit et l’imagerie historique, le texte et le contexte. Dans cette étape pilote, les structures associées à l’architecte Hermann Kallenbach ont été ‘cartographiées’ de façon créative à travers des visites du site et des enregistrements photographiques des bâtiments réels, qui existent dans différentes conditions et contextes – certains sont restaurés, d’autres sont en ruines. Photographier la Johannesburg de Kallenbach nous a permis de faire remonter de façon discursive et visuelle ces architectures et lieux à une époque de croissance extraordinaire de la ville dans la métropole principale du continent africain. Je m’appuie sur le travail de conception de Kallenbach et de son lien avec celui de Walter Benjamin, afin de cadrer mon intervention photographique. Cet essai visuel cherche à montrer que l’on peut faire du travail de Kallenbach une sorte de prisme, ce qui permet l’émergence d’ensembles de compréhension de la relation entre la Johannesburg des débuts et la ville post-apartheid de 2018.
Acknowledgements
Jill Weintroub, Noëleen Murray and the WITS City Institute.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
ORCID
Svea Josephy http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4522-5054
Notes
1 A photographic essay is usually a series of photographs, often with titles or captions, which are related to one another. There is often a sense of a narrative being used to create an emotional response in the viewer and the form is often linked to photojournalism, although I do not intend this piece to journalistic. Where journalism most often intends to explain a set of conditions, I am more interested in asking a set of questions.
2 A hijacked building is a structure, in central Johannesburg most often an office or apartment block, that has been illegally occupied after being abandoned or mothballed by absent land owners or owners who have given up trying to extract rent. Often services have been cut off. These buildings are then “hijacked” by people or gangs who rent out the spaces illegally, often denying the owners access to the building. The buildings often lack services and are health and safety and fire hazards.
3 The legacy of these models are still very much present in the city today. According to Rosenberg (Citation2012)
Prior to the Group Areas Act, South African cities were largely zonal in configuration, resembling the Burgess Concentric Zone model, but with the application of the Group Areas Act, McCarthy and Smit (Citation1984, 58) conclude that only a sectoral spatial model could satisfy the principles of racial zoning. This transition from a colonial zonal urban form to a sectoral apartheid form necessitated substantial land use rearrangements.
4 Of course this was a function of my journey being one of a photographic fieldtrip over a limited time and defined route, while Kallenbach's built legacy emerged during the course of a professional lifetime, for example form the Dutch Reform Church in Fairview of 1906 through to the Lewis and Marks building of 1936.
5 In this body of work, I have taken on several guises, practicing code switching, most obviously photographer-artist and writer, but also playing with the edges of archaeologist, photo-journalist, architectural photographer and street photographer. These genres are conventionally seen by professional photographers as quite strictly divided specializations, but my motivations are quite different. My intentions are to move purposefully and playfully through and around these genres. I am not trying to show a building in its best light, as an architectural photographer might want to do, nor in its worst as a photo-journalist working on an exposé might wish to do. As an artist, using the camera as a tool, I feel at liberty to experiment with these ordinarily congealed genres, in order to say something beyond the photographic in my images.