archival ink print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag

Artwork date: 2007
Signature details: signed and numbered
Exhibited: number 4 from an edition of 10

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image size: 26 x 36 cm; sheet size: 27 x 37 cm unframed

For thirty years Graeme Williams has worked on highly personal photographic essays, reflecting his response to South Africa’s complex evolution. Photographic assignments have taken him to fifty countries and his photographs have been featured in major publications, including National Geographic Magazine, TIME, Newsweek, and The New York Times Magazine. His work is housed in the permanent collections of, amongst others, the Smithsonian (USA), Duke University (USA), North Carolina Museum of Art (USA), Rotterdam Museum of Ethnology (Netherlands), University of South Africa, Iziko South African National Gallery, Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, and the University of Cape Town.

Williams’ work has been shown in solo exhibitions in New York, Paris, London, Cape Town and Johannesburg, and he has participated in many international group exhibitions, including the 2011 Figures and Fictions exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. In 2013, he was awarded the CAP (Contemporary African Photography) Prize as well as the Ernest Cole Award for the series, A City Refracted. His work was included in a major exhibition showcasing South African photography at Huis Marseille Museum for Photography in Amsterdam, and in the Aperture Summer Open exhibition in New York in 2014. Images from his series, As the Grass Grows, were included in the Louis Vuitton Foundation’s Being There exhibition in 2017.

“This work is from the series The Edge of Town. My initial motivation for the project was to capture a segment of South African life as the country’s struggled to find a new post-apartheid identity. My own reactions to the changes happening around me were mixed and often jarring.

Instead of trying to construct a narrative about life in the country as a whole, I concentrated on fragments of life at the literal and figurative edges of town. It is a stream of consciousness that attempts to draw in the elements of both change and lack of change within this paradoxical country. This essay, like a mosaic, is made up of fragments that I have collected as I moved within the spaces occupied by South Africa’s marginalised communities. These fragments build a picture of the challenges, changes, frustrations and joys experienced by people who are attempting to move from the shadows into the centre stage of South African life. I wanted to avoid the conventional photographic documentary approach […] This meant deconstructing my habitual position of observing and photographing a subject from a strongly objective standpoint. The way I went about this was to make use of layers of visual information, and also to photograph from a position that would give a sense of my involvement, thereby communicating something more intimate. […] I constantly had to find a balance between achieving that sense of intimacy and objectivity.”

The Edge of Town was published by Once-Off Publications, 2007.