Graeme Williams

Johannesburg, a city founded on a gold rush in 1886, has prompted a great deal of handwringing amongst writers about its place in the world, and indeed Africa, since the fall of apartheid. By contrast, photographers, especially city residents like Graeme Williams, have been less grandiloquent, accepting its roughshod visual character and unstable temperament as a kind of truth. His earlier black-and-white work combined the feral tradition of Gary Winogrand’s street photography with the more impressionistic urban documentary of David Goldblatt, also a Johannesburg resident and Williams’s mentor, but “A City Refracted” his Ernest Cole Award-winning exhibition, sees this former news photographer confidently chart his own direction, by wedding documentary purpose to a formal style that favors experiment and elision.

“The images are not so much about journalistic content as they are part of an accumulative feeling or sense of the area,” Williams once said in an interview. To this end, his color photos are uncaptioned and possess an amateur, snapshot-like quality, a strategy meant to register his increasing unfamiliarity with his subject, as Johannesburg dismantles its hard apartheid borders. Functionally, his naïve compositional style delivers lots of blur. Pedestrians, a repeat subject, are often swallowed by shadow. Two women in pink bathing costumes are framed without heads. If this formal experimentation is an easily exhaustible strategy, Williams manages to ally it with a clear sense of purpose: of turning his fear (he uses bodyguards while photographing) into a kind of wonder at his hometown’s shop-worn beauty.