Date: 2004
Location: Joubert Park and Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg
Aim: To make a work that explored domestic photography, migration and the shifting demographics of this fragmented city; as a part of the larger exhibition and public project - Johannesburg Circa Now
Media: Photography, Text, Aerial Map

Park Pictures is an installation that responds to the context of Joubert Park, a rare public space and business territory to a large community of street photographers in the dense inner city of Johannesburg. The work comprises 3 parts. 40 portraits of the park photographers, an aerial map marking their inviolably fixed working positions, and a large collection of photographs that have never been claimed by their clients.

The work is about migration and about the reconfiguration of an enormous African city whose development was frozen in time. Since the demise of apartheid there has been a deluge of migration to the centre of the city, with huge numbers of South African migrants and African émigrés claiming it as their own.

The photographers earn their living by photographing people who move through the park, and who are mostly living illegally under fraught and contested circumstances in mothballed former office buildings. They respond to the desire of these newfound residents to have themselves imaged as having ‘made good’ in the city that has newly become home. And, in so doing have inadvertently created an extraordinary ‘social history’ archive that documents the shifting demographics and transformation of this fragmented city.