Kurzbeschreibung
Guy Tillim, einer der interessantesten Fotokünstler Südafrikas, setzt sich in seiner neuesten Bilderserie mit der urbanen Architektur der kolonialen und postkolonialen Gesellschaft in Afrika auseinander. Dabei richtet er seinen Fokus nicht auf den Formalismus der Bauten oder reduziert sie auf Symbole der Herrschaft, sondern betrachtet die Auswirkungen der mehrfachen Machtverschiebungen der letzten 50 Jahre auf diese Architektur. Seine Fotografien lassen viel Raum für eigene Interpretationen und ziehen den Betrachter mit einer besonderen Ästhetik in ihren Bann.
Synopsis
Tillim's earlier photographs documented war-torn Africa and the people whose lives have been shaped by years of conflict and hardship. In this book he focuses on the structures that dot the urban landscape of these troubled countries. The eighty images in this book from Angola, Mozambique, Madagascar and the Democratic Republic of Congo, reveal modern buildings constructed with illusions of prosperity and peace and then left to decay. This collection reflects the intuitive brilliance that is Guy Tillim's hallmark, tells Africa's story of failure and atrophy, and points to the intersection of present-day Africa with its colonial past in countries that were forsaken in the name of progress and the perpetual quest for power.
Über den Autor
Guy Tillim, geb. 1962 in Johannesburg, Südafrika, ist Dokumentar-Fotograf. Sein Werk umfasst Porträts, Fotografien politischer Krisenherde in Afrika sowie urbane fotografische Dokumentationen. Tillims Bilder werden in vielen Ausstellungen präsentiert u.a. auf der Documenta 12 (2007). Er erhielt zahlreiche Preise, darunter 2004 den Daimler Award for South African Photography, einem der bedeutendsten Kulturpreise Südafrikas.
Leseprobe. Abdruck erfolgt mit freundlicher Genehmigung der Rechteinhaber. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.
The word "avenue" makes me think of "street", and "street" of something I read years ago that claimed a filmmaker could witness life in all its essentials by simply being in the street and as close to the gutter as possible. Streets, roads and avenues are where people go and come, where ives and livelihoods are made or unmade. They take us where we want to go and where we don't want to go, as into our journey's end.
I have looked hard at Guy Tillim's photographs of places along a number of quite particular "avenues" and I see they contain a shared history and strength. They achieve this, I believe, owing to Tillim's abilities as an observer (doing what Sherlock Holmes insisted was quite different from simply seeing) as much as to a peculiar power residing in the spaces he photographed.
Saying this puts me in mind of the widely held suspicion, even fear, that photographs can capture people's souls, their essences. Why then might they not apprehend the souls of architecture, too, especially given the multitude of traces left by the humanity that invariably occupies it? Is it not the particular genius of photography to indicate, ironically enough by its estimable verisimilitude, crucial aspects of the meaning hidden in actuality?
It was this and other faculties of photography that persuaded Harvard's Peabody Museum to support documentary photographers in the practice of a more widely construed anthropology. This meant the right brain would have a seat at the table of learning, where one of the first questions to ask is what might be gained when someone like Guy Tillim gives photographic witness to a dimension of the human condition of his own choosing, wherever that quest might take him.
At the end of a year, going down numberless roads, Tillim's testimony is presented in this remarkable book. It shows that the prospect of the art of photography playing an important part in the study of humankind has never been brighter.
Robert Gardner
I was born into a landscape that became unfamiliar as I grew to know it. The mirror of my mind's eye transposed political play into flickering stage. The impulse to photograph this stage is less an attempt to anchor the scenery than to situate myself.
These photographs are not collapsed histories of post-colonial African states or a meditation on aspects of late-modernist-era colonial structures, but a walk through avenues of dreams. Patrice Lumumba's dream, his nationalism, is discernible in the structures, if one reads certain clues, as is the death of his dream, in these de facto monuments. How strange that modernism, which eschewed monument and past for nature and future, should carry such memory so well.
Who can forget Lumumba's speech at the independence ceremony in Leopoldville in 1960? Excluded from the official programme, he rose to deliver a tirade in the presence of the Belgian king: "We have known sarcasm and insults, endured blows morning, noon and night, because we were 'niggers' ... We have seen our lands despoiled under the terms of what was supposedly the rule of the land but which only recognized the rule of the strongest." His reputation as an extremist made on that day led directly to his murder, by Belgian agents, in January 1961. Today, Lumumba's image as a nationalist visionary necessarily remains unmolested by the accusations of abuse of power that became synonymous with later African heads of state.
Lumumba wrote in 1956 that the essential wish of the Congolese elite, in the Belgian colony, was to be Belgian, to have the same freedoms and the same rights. He signalled changes to this desire, posing an obstacle to colonial dreams of exchanging overt dominion with indirect control. The stultifying, directionless conflict that followed ensured that the colonial inheritance rings like an empty shell. As it must in the ears of civil servants who refer to a time, "l'epoque", when their labours, under the Belgian model, would have been justly rewarded and their place in society assured.
In the frailty of this strange and beautiful hybrid landscape struggling to contain the calamities of the past fifty years, there is an indisputably African identity. This is my embrace of it.
Guy Tillim
Le mot " avenue " me fait penser à " rue ", et " rue " me rappelle quelque chose que j'ai lu il y a des années : qu'un cinéaste pouvait témoigner des aspects essentiels de la vie par sa simple présence dans la rue - aussi proche du bidonville que possible. Les rues, les routes, les avenues sont des lieux où les gens vont et viennent, où la vie et la survie se font et se défont. Elles nous entraînent là où nous voulons aller et là où nous ne voulons pas aller, par exemple, jusqu'à la fin de notre voyage.
J'ai regardé attentivement les photographies de Guy Tillim montrant ces lieux longés par des " avenues " si particulières, et je remarque qu'elles sont toutes imprégnées de force et d'histoire. Cela découle, à mes yeux, du talent d'observation de Tillim (ce qui, comme Sherlock Holmes 'a maintes fois souligné, est bien différent de voir), non moins que de l'étrange puissance que dégagent les espaces qu'il a photographiés.
Ceci me fait penser à la superstition bien connue, voire même à la peur, que les esprits, leur essence, pourraient être capturés par les photographies. Pourquoi alors ne pourraient-elles pas également appréhender les âmes de l'architecture, sur laquelle tant de traces ont été laissées par 'humanité ? N'est-ce pas là le génie de la photographie que d'indiquer - ironiquement, de par son inestimable vraisemblance - les aspects fondamentaux du sens caché de la réalité ?
C'est bien cela, ainsi que d'autres pouvoirs de la photographie, qui a convaincu le Harvard Peabody Museum de soutenir les photographes documentaires, dans une pratique d'une 'anthropologie entendue dans un sens plus étendu. Désormais, le cerveau droit a toute sa place à la table de l'étude.
I have looked hard at Guy Tillim's photographs of places along a number of quite particular "avenues" and I see they contain a shared history and strength. They achieve this, I believe, owing to Tillim's abilities as an observer (doing what Sherlock Holmes insisted was quite different from simply seeing) as much as to a peculiar power residing in the spaces he photographed.
Saying this puts me in mind of the widely held suspicion, even fear, that photographs can capture people's souls, their essences. Why then might they not apprehend the souls of architecture, too, especially given the multitude of traces left by the humanity that invariably occupies it? Is it not the particular genius of photography to indicate, ironically enough by its estimable verisimilitude, crucial aspects of the meaning hidden in actuality?
It was this and other faculties of photography that persuaded Harvard's Peabody Museum to support documentary photographers in the practice of a more widely construed anthropology. This meant the right brain would have a seat at the table of learning, where one of the first questions to ask is what might be gained when someone like Guy Tillim gives photographic witness to a dimension of the human condition of his own choosing, wherever that quest might take him.
At the end of a year, going down numberless roads, Tillim's testimony is presented in this remarkable book. It shows that the prospect of the art of photography playing an important part in the study of humankind has never been brighter.
Robert Gardner
I was born into a landscape that became unfamiliar as I grew to know it. The mirror of my mind's eye transposed political play into flickering stage. The impulse to photograph this stage is less an attempt to anchor the scenery than to situate myself.
These photographs are not collapsed histories of post-colonial African states or a meditation on aspects of late-modernist-era colonial structures, but a walk through avenues of dreams. Patrice Lumumba's dream, his nationalism, is discernible in the structures, if one reads certain clues, as is the death of his dream, in these de facto monuments. How strange that modernism, which eschewed monument and past for nature and future, should carry such memory so well.
Who can forget Lumumba's speech at the independence ceremony in Leopoldville in 1960? Excluded from the official programme, he rose to deliver a tirade in the presence of the Belgian king: "We have known sarcasm and insults, endured blows morning, noon and night, because we were 'niggers' ... We have seen our lands despoiled under the terms of what was supposedly the rule of the land but which only recognized the rule of the strongest." His reputation as an extremist made on that day led directly to his murder, by Belgian agents, in January 1961. Today, Lumumba's image as a nationalist visionary necessarily remains unmolested by the accusations of abuse of power that became synonymous with later African heads of state.
Lumumba wrote in 1956 that the essential wish of the Congolese elite, in the Belgian colony, was to be Belgian, to have the same freedoms and the same rights. He signalled changes to this desire, posing an obstacle to colonial dreams of exchanging overt dominion with indirect control. The stultifying, directionless conflict that followed ensured that the colonial inheritance rings like an empty shell. As it must in the ears of civil servants who refer to a time, "l'epoque", when their labours, under the Belgian model, would have been justly rewarded and their place in society assured.
In the frailty of this strange and beautiful hybrid landscape struggling to contain the calamities of the past fifty years, there is an indisputably African identity. This is my embrace of it.
Guy Tillim
Le mot " avenue " me fait penser à " rue ", et " rue " me rappelle quelque chose que j'ai lu il y a des années : qu'un cinéaste pouvait témoigner des aspects essentiels de la vie par sa simple présence dans la rue - aussi proche du bidonville que possible. Les rues, les routes, les avenues sont des lieux où les gens vont et viennent, où la vie et la survie se font et se défont. Elles nous entraînent là où nous voulons aller et là où nous ne voulons pas aller, par exemple, jusqu'à la fin de notre voyage.
J'ai regardé attentivement les photographies de Guy Tillim montrant ces lieux longés par des " avenues " si particulières, et je remarque qu'elles sont toutes imprégnées de force et d'histoire. Cela découle, à mes yeux, du talent d'observation de Tillim (ce qui, comme Sherlock Holmes 'a maintes fois souligné, est bien différent de voir), non moins que de l'étrange puissance que dégagent les espaces qu'il a photographiés.
Ceci me fait penser à la superstition bien connue, voire même à la peur, que les esprits, leur essence, pourraient être capturés par les photographies. Pourquoi alors ne pourraient-elles pas également appréhender les âmes de l'architecture, sur laquelle tant de traces ont été laissées par 'humanité ? N'est-ce pas là le génie de la photographie que d'indiquer - ironiquement, de par son inestimable vraisemblance - les aspects fondamentaux du sens caché de la réalité ?
C'est bien cela, ainsi que d'autres pouvoirs de la photographie, qui a convaincu le Harvard Peabody Museum de soutenir les photographes documentaires, dans une pratique d'une 'anthropologie entendue dans un sens plus étendu. Désormais, le cerveau droit a toute sa place à la table de l'étude.
