I saw this photograph by Ilan Godfrey on the site The New Breed of Documentary Photographers, which I heard about through tumblr, but I forgot from whom, so I’m sorry for not giving that person credit.
It is a photograph of a resident of Hillbrow, Johannesburg, South Africa.
The caption:
“Josef Jones, 20 shares this bed with his two friends, Simpiwe Guru, 16 and Themba Ndlovu, 14. They don’t work and don’t go to school. Banket Street and Kapteijn Street, 2005”
I meant to blog about this earlier, but I’ve been so wrapped up in my work, all I’ve really done on tumblr is reblog other people’s posts. Tonight, I took a break from studying to look at pictures from my trip to South Africa in December, and I was reminded of this photograph.
I was in South Africa for five weeks with my boyfriend, who is from a suburb of Jo’burg. We spent almost two weeks in and around Gauteng, although we only went into Jo’burg proper once. The entire time we were there, Michael and his family were overly concerned about my safety, and it was an entirely new experience for me. I lived on my own in NYC when I was 18, so I’m not unaccustomed to urban environments, but this was different. I’ve never seen so much electric fencing in my life. Michael’s mother said at one point that there’s no point putting up Christmas lights in Jo’burg—no one can see them, because of the fencing. And there are parking lot guards at every store, restaurant, and street.
We spent a day in Soweto, the largest township in Jo’burg. We went to see Winnie Mandela’s house, the interior of Nelson Mandela’s old home, the only street in the world to have housed two Nobel Peace Prize winners, and we visited a Shebeen, where a stranger asked if he could take a picture of me because he had never seen a white girl drink “like a tsotsi” (I had a 40 of Hansa my boyfriend had handed me).
And we witnessed a lot of poverty, from every direction. On our way to Soweto, there was a store set up adjacent to a shanty-town that advertised “all the materials you need to set up your own shack.” And there were people living in deplorable conditions set up right next to affluent suburbs.
Granted, this in no way represents most of South Africa, which is beautiful, relatively safe, and financially secure when compared to the rest of Africa; but the time we spent in Jo’burg was eye-opening for me in a lot of ways.
I think it is also significant that Jo’burg hasn’t always been this way and that crime has increased dramatically over the past two decades or so, which the photographer says: ”I recall my visits to Hillbrow as a young boy as an exciting day out. But as the years past it became a no go area. Today Hillbrow has become one of the most dangerous parts of the city of Johannesburg where crimes are on the rise.”
The rest of the photographs from the series can be found here.