Category: Photography

For the unknown stranger, judged and contained

In this book, Rory du Plessis enables you to look into the eyes of people who were subject to mental institutions in South Africa and to experience a sanctification of them as individuals. This beautiful protest touches on the slippery issue of anonymity and intimacy without hurting the people pictured.

Cattle to believe in

SHE STANDS WITH the kind of poise that catches you in the throat, and once you’ve made contact with her eye, you cannot move on without feeling that something within you has changed. Is it in the sheer beauty of her coat, speckled by God himself? Or is […]

All feathered things, great and small

GLOWING, YET UNDERSTATED magic comes of a particular kind of candid, descriptive writing that doesn’t stoop to sensationalism or bald self-promotion. You can find this in George Orwell’s domestic diaries, but you can also find it in Adam Riley’s Birds of South Africa. This current publication offers an […]

Look, deeper

SHE’S LOOKING AT you peripherally, her face fierce and focused in profile, a pencil in her hand. She’s a woman who has waited her turn in a schoolroom in Kampala, Uganda. For generations. But she’s more than just a reflection of education and abandonment, of culture and sexism. […]

RIP Queen Linda the Only

THE IDEA OF writing a conventional tribute to Linda Givon, the founder of the Goodman Gallery, who died suddenly on 5 October 2020, at 84, seems trite. This is because she was much more than the pedestrian sum of her parts. She was born, educated, married, divorced, widowed. […]

Ties which bind us all

PHOTOGRAPHIC EXHIBITION REVIEW: IKHAYA LIKAYMOYA. A WOMAN’S FACE is drenched with baptismal fluid. Her expression is serene. Her eyes closed. Another woman holds her peer from behind, a call of fierceness on her lips, fervency in her posture. A child peeks solemnly through the fabric and drapery surrounding […]

Melanin deliberations and navel-gazing

HE’S EARNED HIS reputation – and several awards – as a fine art photographer, but Mikhael Subotzky has been smashing definitions throughout the trajectory of his career. This very large solo exhibition, entitled Massive Nerve Corpus at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg sees his thinking pointed in several […]