Guy Tillim, Cagliari - Born in 1962 in Johannesburg. Guy Tillim is a great figure of the contemporary South-African photographic scene. He began as a young reporter in the 1980’s, when he became aware of photography as a way to fight against the racial gap created by the Apartheid in his country: “the camera is the ideal tool to transcend those borders, to see what happened in my own country”.
For years, Tillim photographed documentary projects of visual and historical strength to create testimonies to the social conflict and inequalities prevailing in South Africa. In those pictures, blunt and dark colours appear suddenly from a damp grey background, in an imitative harmony with the harshness of its subjects.
His work has been widely published in press and in numerous books, and exhibited in prestigious festivals and collective exhibitions throughout Europe; for example, Africa Remix in 2004, PHotoEspaña in 2005 and Dokumenta XII in 2007.
Invited for a two-week residency in Cagliari by the Fondazione di Sardegna in agreement with curator Marco Delogu, award-winning South African photographer Guy Tillim, also recently awarded the Henri Cartier-Bresson Award, investigates the phenomenon of migration, the integration process and the impact on society through twenty-one shots.
A look at the city and its inhabitants sculpted by a light not unlike that of his homeland, which allows him to extrapolate urban fragments where, through everyday gestures, residents and migrants move. He freezes scenes of life lived on the streets that speak of welcome. He restores frames of a pulsating city where Cagliari residents, migrants and tourists coexist seamlessly. A glimpse of the streets and squares of the city center where makeshift markets are followed by crowded bus stops, among people shopping, chatting and strolling, or waiting at traffic lights to cross the street. Each immersed in their own thoughts, each seemingly oblivious to those around them. And where each photograph, in addition to being conceived as a single image, can be read as one long photographic representation, a choice adopted also for the original structure of the catalog.
A look at the city and its inhabitants sculpted by a light not unlike that of his homeland, which allows him to extrapolate urban fragments where, through everyday gestures, residents and migrants move. He freezes scenes of life lived on the streets that speak of welcome. He restores frames of a pulsating city where Cagliari residents, migrants and tourists coexist seamlessly. A glimpse of the streets and squares of the city center where makeshift markets are followed by crowded bus stops, among people shopping, chatting and strolling, or waiting at traffic lights to cross the street. Each immersed in their own thoughts, each seemingly oblivious to those around them. And where each photograph, in addition to being conceived as a single image, can be read as one long photographic representation, a choice adopted also for the original structure of the catalog.
Guy Tillim, Cagliari
Hardcover, 17x24 cm, 60 pages | Punctum Press | ISBN: 978-88-95410-65-4
Designed and made by Nicola Veccia Scavalli