Patrick Waterhouse and Mikhael Subotzky worked at Ponte City, the iconic Johannesburg apartment building which is Africa’s tallest residential skyscraper, for more than six years. They photographed the residents and documented the building – every door, the view from every window, the image on every television screen. This remarkable body of images is presented here in counterpoint with an extensive archive of found material and historical documents. The visual story is integrated with a sustained sequence of essays and documentary texts. 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.
A mysterious quote, supposedly from the modernist pioneer, Le Corbusier, played a large part in shaping their approach. It observes that the essence of modernist architecture resides in a building’s apertures: the openings — the windows, doors, arches — of a solid structure. And so, the pair set about systematically photographing the apertures of every apartment in Ponte City: the front doors, the outer windows, and the buzzing television screens — three distinct apertures catalogued into three different typologies, each of which the artists present in three different ways — via individual photographs, projections, and four-metre high lightboxes. First exhibited in 2010, the three lightboxes were arranged to mirror the structure of the towers — composing every front door, and every outer window, and every television screen — golden light melting through the relentless repetition of the building.
The long-term project obtained the Discovery Award of the 2011 Rencontres d’Arles Photography Festival and the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2015.
