Postcard from Johannesburg

The photographer Krisanne Johnson believes you can learn many things about a country by the way youth live—from fashion to music to home environments.

Image: Krisanne Johnson.

Like many others, US photographer Krisanne Johnson headed to South Africa earlier this month but, as The New Yorker points out, she didn’t go there for the football. Johnson has been to South Africa several times over the years to document youth culture in Johannesburg, including the culture surrounding Kwaito and, most recently, the fashion movement known as the Smarteez.

On her work, Johnson states: “I believe you can learn many things about a country by the way youth live—from fashion to music to home environments. And this is a recurring theme in most of my work, whether in the United States or southern Africa.” I like this.

You can view more of Johnson’s excellent pictures from across southern Africa and the United States here.

Further Reading

How to unmake the world

In this wide-ranging conversation, para-disciplinary artist Nolan Oswald Dennis reflects on space, time, Blackness, and the limits of Western knowledge—offering a strategy for imagining grounded in African and anti-colonial traditions.

A migrant’s tale

On his latest EP, Kwame Brenya turns a failed migration into musical testimony—offering a biting critique of ECOWAS, broken borders, and the everyday collapse of pan-African ideals.

What Portugal forgets

In the film ‘Tales of Oblivion,’ Dulce Fernandes excavates the buried history of slavery in Portugal, challenging a national mythology built on sea voyages, silence, and selective memory.

Trump tariffs and US Imperialism

Trump’s April 2025 tariff blitz ignited market chaos and deepened rifts within his own coalition. Beneath the turmoil lies a battle between technocrats, ultranationalists, and anti-imperial populists, all vying to reshape—or destroy—American global power.