Artist's statement

Large corporations and white residents fled Johannesburg's inner city in the 1990s. The removal of the Group Areas Act foreshadowed a flow into the city of black residents and small black businesses seeking opportunities and looking for a better life. The former denizens looked back with righteous justifications at a city that was given over, if not to plunder, then to mayhem. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy; it was as it should be, and eyewitness reports and statistics obliged. We all had horror stories.

This has changed. Emerging from the dust of the battle for the streets, where the forces of law have been victorious, are the shaken towers occupied by tenants who are holding onto their tenure and managing the buildings in a manner of their own devising.

The tenants' story went something like this: in the 1990s the owners absconded, leaving managing agents to retrieve what rents they could. In most cases, these agents were corrupt, they did not pay the utilities and many disappeared with the monies. These funds were tidy sums, millions paid in rents by poor people who would rather pay their rent than eat so as not to have to go back to where they came from. Body Corporates became a relic of a more genteel era. Windows were broken and not repaired. Lifts froze and their shafts became tips. Communal responsibilities were not marked out and not paid for. As a consequence the City started closing on the buildings for unpaid dues, and the buildings started looking like fire hazards to city fathers and developers with an eye on the rents that can be obtained in the bloom of an African City.

The tenants have constituted committees to face these threats, to prevent the City foreclosure on utilities, and have with meager resources attempted to clean up the buildings. They have delayed the inevitable, but their committees have no basis in law and are vulnerable to an onslaught of capital and legal shenanigans that have invoked statutes and non-compliances that carry the penalty of eviction. The question is really whether Johannesburg will revert to being a city of exclusion, or whether opportunities will be taken to include the poor, a condition for the emergence of a great African city.

Biography

Tillim was born in Johannesburg in 1962. He started photographing professionally in 1986 and joined Afrapix, a collective of South African photographers with whom he worked closely until 1990. His work as a freelance photographer in South Africa for the local and foreign media included positions with Reuters between 1986 and 1988, and with Agence France Presse in 1993 and 1994. Tillim has received many awards for his work including the 2004 DaimlerChrysler Award for South African photography, the 2003 Higashikawa Overseas Photographer Award in Japan, and the Prix SCAM (Societe Civile des Auteurs Multimedia) Roger Pic in 2002. His work has been included in numerous exhibitions of South African art and photography, both in South Africa and internationally.

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