Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse: Ponte City Revisited: 54 Storeys

Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse worked at Ponte City, the iconic Johannesburg apartment building and Africa’s tallest residential skyscraper, for more than six years. There they photographed its residents and exhaustively documented the building-every door, the view from every window, the image on every television screen. This remarkable body of photographs appears here in counterpoint to an extensive archive of found material and historical documents; a sustained sequence of essays and documentary texts is also integrated into the visual story. In the essays, some of South Africa’s leading scholars and writers explore Ponte City’s unique place in Johannesburg and in the imagination of its citizens. What emerges is a complex portrait of a place shaped by contending projections, a single, unavoidable building seen as refuge and monstrosity, dreamland and dystopia, a lightning rod for a society’s hopes and fears, and always a beacon to navigate by. This long-term project received the Discovery Award at Les Rencontres d'Arles in 2011. The first edition of Ponte City, published by Steidl in 2014 and now out-of-print, was awarded the Deutsche Boerse Photography Prize in 2015.

In order to reconstitute its story, one must pay close attention to this multitude of voices, disentangling what is true from what is felt or imagined and constitutes a different kind of reality. It is an inevitably polyphonic narrative that Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse offer us here. - Clement Cheroux