a.magazine’s African Interview Series

South African photojournalist Guy Tillim, born and raised in Johannesburg, began taking pictures in the mid 1980s during the last days of apartheid. Initially part of the photocollective Afropix, Tillim went on to work in some of the most notoriously challenged parts of Africa, sometimes for agencies such as Agence France-Presse and Reuters. He has photographed child soldiers in Congo, refugees in Angola (’Kunhinga Portraits’) and life in the high rises of Johannesburg. But Tillim’s work counters First-World expectations of these places; in between his portraits of those caught in the aftermath of war or displacement, he is apt to capture the stillness of these spaces as well. During an election rally, he might shoot toward the sky, capturing the tops of raised arms beneath a tree that fills most of the frame; or turn away from the action to shoot the rapids of the Congo River, or an empty bed under mosquito netting. In famine-stricken Malawi, Tillim chose to take classically-lit, Caravaggio-like portraits of its residents. That these moments of repose dominate a body of work shot in some of the world’s most war-torn places is a testament to the quietude of Tillim’s vision. His photographs have a hush and luminosity that runs counter to traditional ideas of photojournalism.

Tillim has won numerous awards for his work, which has been shown in galleries and museums throughout the world. He lives outside Cape Town.

You started working professionally in the mid 1980s, during the last decade of apartheid. How and why did you start taking photographs? Who were major influences for you as you began your career?

I started to take photographs in 1986 — it was a way to see what was happening in my own country. I left a white boarding school at 17, went to University and became vaguely aware of what was going around me for the first time in my life. I wasn’t particularly interested in photographs at all. The camera was a passport—what was going in the country then was interesting to the rest of the world. It is hard to imagine the separation of the races. We [photographers] instantly had work, we had an audience—which is more difficult for fine art photographers. We sold images to the wire agencies. I worked with a collective called Afropix that was instrumental in getting photographers together and recording the news. I’m afraid that to some extent I was bought by the foreign media; there was a way to view what was happening in South Africa that was devoid of subtlety, and to some extent we bought into that. Yet there were some photographers—such as David Goldblatt—who weren’t working within that idiom at all. He [David] was doing his own thing. Some of his photographs will have staying power for a long time. Others—of the barricades, of the townships, or civil strife—are not necessarily wholly indicative of the period.

You began your career as a photojournalist but your work can now be found in art exhibitions such as Documenta 12. Do you continue to see yourself as photojournalist? What is the process by which documentary photography comes to be seen as art?

I think we can’t really invent labels for ourselves, though we might try to live up to them. Most of what I have been working on in the last 10 years has on my own recognizance. Whether you’re a photojournalist or not seems to be straightforward, except when you challenge the notions of how images are recorded. Perhaps you ask questions of visual language, or challenge preconceptions. I’m not really sure how it happens for myself, that is, going from working for newspapers and magazines into an art gallery. But they’re not mutually exclusive. In 2005, the work I did in Johannesburg [the Jo’Burg series] was published in a book and shown in galleries, as well as published in magazines and newspapers and so on. Same with thing with Documenta 12—my images of the Congolese election were also shown in Congolese daily newspapers.

Visual language is not as sophisticated as written language. There’s a lot more gray area, and misconceptions about what make a good image. You have to look at a whole body of work, look at intention. I think this has gone hand and hand with the flowering of visual language in the last decade. Conversely, it has coincided with the demise of photographic essays. If you think of the picture magazine of the 1980s, they ran long picture essays; this is not happening anymore. Many big agencies have been bought by Getty and Corbis. Images are more cheaper and readily available. This conception that photojournalists are arbiters of truth is being questioned somewhat. The idea that a photographer can stop a war—these ideas which were currency in the 80s and 90s—has somewhat dimmed.

Some of your photographs — for instance, those in the Jo’burg series — depict quite personal spaces, such as bedrooms. How do you go about gaining the trust of your subjects so that they allow you this access? How long did you spend on this project, and why did you chose this particular block of high rises?

I spent a lot of time in Johannesburg, rented an apartment there and lived there for four or five months. I got to know people, they saw me around. I would walk by their door and they might invite me in. Yet a lot of the time I was shown the door very smartly

I spent about five months working on [the project]. Those high rises are the center of Johsannesburg, formerly white Johannesburg. Jo’burg is sort of the little New York of South Africa—a powerhouse. It’s an extraordinary city. With the end of apartheid, black people who had been excluded from economic activity have moved into the city. And the whites became really scared, they put up high walls. For a long time Jo’burg was a lawless place and got a bad reputation. People moved in where they kind of rented out space and things were overcrowded, and crime was rife. But I knew it well, it was where I was born. It was emblematic of a city becoming an African city, its color, its darkness. It’s a very vibrant place. For five months, I was the only white guy on the block. I had a sort of diplomatic immunity.

You have said that, as a photographer, ‘neutrality is a luxury’ and many artists working in Africa might feel similarly. Taking this statement beyond the context of the work itself: was there ever a time when you became involved in the lives of your subjects beyond the relationship of observer and observed?

Sometimes you end up helping people who are injured. In Johannesburg—one of the people I got to know quite well—their child died. You help with that. You do become involved a little bit. Over my years as a photojournalist, I’ve had to help people get to hospital.

You have written there is a ‘dual journey’ that occurs when you are working, one that is both external and internal. Can you elaborate on the interior journey that occurs for you in the course of your travels and your work?

The internal journey can become the subject of your photographs, I think, and is really important in a sense— that is the difficulty— to overcome that. Because of the nature of visual representation you’re very much in danger always reinforcing preconceptions, of not really seeing things. Of reporting your idea of what you’re looking at, of your own preconceived notion. You have to get beyond that, not be so concerned with your subject —that’s kind of an attachment. It’s a strange contradiction. The conventional wisdom that you become concerned with your subject—that’s everything—and you can portray them in a way that you can help, further some idea of the human condition often it leads you into a very blind area. This kind of iconography that is so prevalent in photographs, to get away from that—that’s the internal journey.

Can you recall a specific instance of this?

I went to Petros Village in Malawi for a few weeks for a commission: ‘Go to Malawi and photograph famine’. So I stayed two weeks in a village to photograph famine, but I realize I couldn’t because I couldn’t understand famine. What did I know about famine really? I can’t really know. I know what someone who is hungry should look like, and I can make people look like that too. Bu the other way to approach it is to move away from that, and let the subject speak for themselves. You might find that some people go about their day and you photograph that, so you might photograph famine and yet have someone smiling. You can’t reinforce your ideas that everyone is a victim. It’s almost down to a political position. People are not necessarily victims, but they need access to markets. Some of them are hungry, some of them are not. I’m not going to photograph in the sense that they are dying— they’re not dying, they’re living a precarious existence. It changes the way you photograph them. Your internal journey becomes more important in a sense. Often photojournalists use as a justification ‘we can help you’, but that’s not necessarily the case. The only justification is really you trying to take a journey. You try and find out why you’re there.

How were your images of Malawi received?

In the end it worked out well and those pictures were seen widely. The goals were realized in a sense that these pictures were seen in a lot of places. If I had just photographed famine victims, that might not have been the case. I couldn’t have done it that way.

This idea you have of a place and how you might work is often not how it is—you have to overcome what seems like a bit of a void. Often in these places, people are living very hard and it’s very depressing.

You were recently awarded the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography from the Peabody Museum at Harvard. How did you spend your fellowship year?

I ended up photographing buildings from the colonial period— in Angola, Mozambique, Congo, Madagascar. There’s a ten year period in the late modernist world where there was this grand colonial architecture built in Francophone Africa and Lusophone Africa. It was this strange contemporary mythological time. These buildings are impressive, for all their inappropriateness they’re nonetheless they form part of a contemporary African stage. If you look at them a certain way, they’re just kind of floating worlds. Think of eastern Europe in the 70s and 80s—this kind of landscape and architecture was embraced, was loved, even though it represented a authoritarian vision. [The architecture] is celebrated as a kind of quirky machine. What it represented was this totalitarian power over people’s lives. There, it has somehow been transcended. In Africa, that’s not the case–these spaces are shunned. [that world where you can look at your space where see it as a strange and beautiful. The buildings are very much inhabited but many are decaying, so the challenge was not to become a connoisseur of decay, or come up with some sort of Havana-esque vision. I’d though about this project for quite a kind of a number of years, wondered how I’d ever get around to it. Then the fellowship came.

If you could meet and talk with any other African artist — author, painter, sculptor, musician, singer, designer – who would it be? Why?

I really like the people I’ve met already. Maybe the photographer Samuel Fosso—his is the only picture I’ve ever bought, a self portrait. He’s a young photographer working in a studio and he made a photograph at the end of a roll where he dresses up— he’s got these big round sunglasses, with a 70s-style high collared shirt open at the chest. It just has attitude. He’s having fun, he confounds you’re expectations of Africa, and he does it well.