Date: 2001
Location: Joubert Park, Inner City Johannesburg
Curators: Dorothee Kreutzfeld, Jo Ractliffe, Bie Venter
Partners: Joubert Park Association of Photographers, First National Bank
Brief: Artists were invited to participate in the Joubert Park Public Art Project
(a cultural project that engaged with the City of Johannesburg’s urban renewal initiatives) and to make a work in response to the park, the Johannesburg Art Gallery situated within it, or the surrounding inner city precinct
Media: Custom –made Tent, Tripod, Studio Lights, Printed Backdrops

This project engaged with the culture and economy of Joubert Park, and was a response to the desires and business interests of a group of street photographers I came to know through my research. The park is one of few green spaces in the dense, “Afropolitan” inner city of Johannesburg. It is surrounded by what was once a thriving retail and business centre for the city’s white middle class - abandoned in the early 80’s for the suburbs, with its decentralised malls and business parks. In its place African immigrants, refugees and poor and working class South Africans now occupy derelict apartments and office buildings once designed for other uses. Their occupation is contested, and living quarters are typically dense and fraught, with sometimes as many as 12 people living in a room designed for one. The street space is intense, chaotic and often perilous. In this context, the park is respite. It is also business territory to upwards of 40 street photographers.

READ MORE

While exploring and considering the curatorial brief, I discovered that the park was full of photographers who occupied inviolably fixed positions along the path that cuts east west across the park. They attract passers by who can pay for their services, and use the scenic attractions as backdrops that signal their subject’s as having ‘made good’ and established themselves in the city that has newly become home. Photography is at the centre of the culture and economy of the park. In conversation with a group of photographers about the conditions surrounding their work, it emerged that they had been unsuccessfully trying to persuade the City to allow them to use a small existing building in the park as a studio. And so, with funding from an inner city bank interested in supporting small business ideas, and working with the business interests and desires of a core group of photographers, my project was to design and install a portable, mobile photographic studio into the park. At 12 square meters, it was a durable, waterproof structure with lights and multiple backdrops and props for everyday business use. The photographers chose the selection of images that were printed onto canvas from a library of stock images in terms of what they thought would most attract their customers to be photographed against. The studio was shared by many photographers and operational for almost three years until it grew too shabby and weathered to use any longer. The photographers are currently working on a business plan and fundraising towards a more permanent studio environment both outside and inside the park.