Among the most striking portraits in South African photographer and filmmaker Sydelle Willow Smith’s online portfolio are those taken in the Western Cape, reflecting much of what Cape Town and the wider province stand for: the engaging (solidarity and protest marches; parades; a reportage about Blikkiesdorp, no longer just a “temporary” village echoing the crudest […]
Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities by Carl Nightingale (University of Chicago Press, 2012) examines the world history of segregation, highlighting the notorious role played by South Africa in dividing communities along racial lines (a central case study is Johannesburg). As Nightingale reminds us, segregation in South Africa began long before it became formally […]
A recurring theme in director Akin Omotoso’s films is the fraught postapartheid relationship between Nigerian migrants and their South African hosts. Part of the reason is autobiographical: Akin is the son of Kole, the literary professor, who moved his young family, including his then teenage son, to South Africa in the early 1990s from Nigeria. […]
Adam Glasser video shot in the legendary Kohinoor appliances & music store in Market Street, Johannesburg. In the early 2000s, Kohinoor still stocked hundreds of sealed (mint) jazz & soul vinyls, all super cheap.
We’re starting a new weekly series today. We ask photographers who make portraits of African subjects to introduce us to their work. Basically they pick their five favorite photographs, describe the subject matter, what brought them to the image and what kind of mood they were trying to capture. Our first guest is Zachary Rosen, […]
The Canadian High Commission to South Africa, probably meaning well or deliberately unaware of the emptiness of rainbow metaphors, is looking for photographs capturing “the Rainbow Nation”. They’re working with the Johannesburg Bailey Seippel Gallery on this. The photographer’s entries will have to display “multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-racial South Africa”. For real. It’s not the […]
From Zetina Mosia’s upcoming album “The RoundAbout”, this track: ‘Lately’. We’ve said this before, but the Johannesburg label Iapetus is an exceptional breeding ground for South African artists — remember Fifi the Rai Blaster, Yugen Blakrok, Robo the Technician or Gin i Grindith — with a special mention for Kanif, the producer behind many of […]
John Akomfrah’s new film, The Nine Muses, continues the powerful cine-cultural tradition inaugurated by the Black Audio Film Collective in Britain in the early 1980s. Similarly to his earlier films, Akomfrah handles archival footage with a profound sensitivity; he does not interrogate the history of migration through the archive, nor pore over ‘celluloid fossils’, rather, […]
I swore I wasn’t going to add a thing to the discussion about the idiotic poster campaign by the student/youth wing of South Africa’s opposition Democratic Alliance about a future non-racial love-fest. I have remained shtum (yiddish for ‘quiet’) about its horrid aesthetics, its awful family snap-shot quality. (Some have claimed it’s like a Benetton […]
In the latest of those ubiquitous lists/rankings floating around the web, a Mexican research group has listed the world’s most dangerous cities based on homicide rates. Most of the top candidates are listed from Central and South America. So, which African city gets the top honors to represent us?
