Confronting complex histories of postcolonialism in Africa: The photography of Guy Tillim 

In Avenue Patrice Lumumba, dilapidated architecture comes to evoke a sense of both loss and hope, which contrasts with the kind of architecture we see in Museum of the Revolution where new, standardised high-rises (or at least cranes as a visual metaphor for construction) litters the work. How does this shift capture the transformation of post-colonial Africa?

Between about 2015 and 2019 I was working in the streets of various African capitals taking pictures that were eventually published in a book called Museum of the Revolution. My interest in the streets came from photographing events in the 1980s and ‘90s. The streets, named and renamed, seemed to me to function as silent witnesses to the ebb and flow of political, economic and social shifts of power that have taken place in African countries over the past 65 years: from colonial to postcolonial regimes that in many cases embraced socialist policies, and then from African Nationalist to global capitalist states. The decaying buildings had complex political reasons for being so, and I was concerned that a certain kind of depiction of decay was a simplistic visual metaphor for an African political condition of a certain era. I wanted to avoid that because my attraction to the buildings was of a different order: the overthrow of colonial regimes, with the pathos of failed expectations that went with it. I imagined an exciting future, of being young in a place that was becoming something new.

You’ve previously discussed the “neutrality” that is imbued in your work – is this neutrality a portrayal of the “reality” of what you see, or a subversion of a more loaded kind of photojournalism of Africa?

The photographic reportage emanating from Africa in the 1980's and 1990's was fixated on the calamities of the post-colonial era and I was, in the way I portrayed the events, no exception. However, I couldn't help but become increasingly spellbound by the landscape and the architecture of the cities, and at a certain point I lost interest in the events and focused instead on the surroundings.I found it liberating to approach an environment, overloaded with certitude about postcolonial narrative, with a neutrality that I hoped would convey a kind of ambiguity - an ambiguity that is illustrated well in the Museum of the Revolution in Maputo, Mozambique. There is a panoramic painting produced by North Korean artists depicting the liberation of the capital from Portuguese colonial rule. It illustrates the rhetoric of a revolution even as the leader and his followers parade through the streets and avenues laid out with grandeur by the colonial powers.

How has your work changed over time, from earlier bodies of work like Departure to your use of composite imagery today? What does this shift reflect?

I think it reflects a fascination with visual language. Since I started taking pictures in the 1980s, visual vocabulary has evolved exponentially. An increasingly nuanced intention of the photographer is discernible outside of clumsy signifiers. We know that the verisimilitude of a photograph is a kind of hair-trigger: there’s a rush to meaning even though the intention of the photographer may be obscure. But the camera sees more than the eye, and is more dispassionate. I wanted my mind’s eye to be more like the lens.

Something that is striking in your work is that architecture and the built environment can be seen as “representing” the people that it is designed to serve (as well as those it is designed not to serve). In works like Civic Centre from Joburg: Points of View, however, what is so striking is the notable absence of people. How do you navigate the relationship between people and the built environment in your work, and to what end? 

 In Avenue Patrice Lumumba published in about 2007, I concentrated on the buildings themselves. They took on a fascinating shape and patina for me as they forged an indisputable African identity. History shows up on the outside of things. In Museum of the Revolution I tried to incorporate the movement of the street. The images that tease my eye are [those] where people seem to be in a dance [with] this elaborate environment.

Would you say that your work captures a moment in time, or is history the wider context that informs what we, as viewers, see?

History is reinvented by each generation, a succession of truth as much as power, and is the challenge to culture itself. Perhaps one of the greatest possibilities of photography is to provide a window onto a world or a scene, offer a landscape where nothing hides from an even gaze, yet is also arrestingly ambiguous, open to interpretation. 

As a photojournalist, does the intention of how your work is received changed depending on whether it is displayed in a gallery setting, or presented in the form of photobooks, etc?

The gallery and photobook are interesting because in the larger spaces they carry the full burden of the work. One’s intention is writ clear, or not. In a magazine article or newspaper, of course, the images generally conform to the intentions of the editors.