South African photographer Guy Tillim (Johannesburg, 1962) has documented the aftermath of war and the political change in South Africa and neighbouring countries from the last years of Apartheid to the present day. For his work he has been honoured with numerous awards including the Prix SCAM (Societe Civile des Auteurs Multimedia) Roger Pic in 2002, the Higashikawa Overseas Photographer Award (Japan) in 2003, the 2004 DaimlerChrysler Award for South African photography and the Leica Oskar Barnack Award in 2005. He has also participated in several important international art shows featuring art from Africa that range from Documenta 12 (2007); the São Paulo Bienal (2006); SLUM: Art and life in the here and now of the civil age at the Neue Galerie in Graz; Photography, Video, Mixed Media III at the DaimlerChrysler Gallery in Berlin; and the travelling exhibition Africa Remix (2004-2007). He is the author of several books that span his career and dissolve the borders between “art” and “photojournalism” or “documentary photography”, notably Departure (2003), Leopold and Mobutu (2004), Jo’burg (2005), Congo Democratic (2006), and most recently Avenue Patrice Lumumba (2008).
Guy Tillim grew up in South Africa as the rigid structures of Apartheid came down and as the Republic of South Africa emerged through struggle to embrace all sectors of its population. Trained in economics and business studies, Tillim nonetheless became interested in photographing this changing South Africa in order to discover his own land. First working for newspapers and magazines as a freelance and then as a photographer with the renowned agency Afrapix whose members included Omar Badsha, Paul Weinberg, Cedric Nunn, Peter Mackenzie, Rafik Mayet, Jeeya Rajgopaul, Paul Alberts, Paul Grendon, Santu Mofokeng, Gideon Mendel, among others. Afrapix foundered in the wake of the end of Apartheid and Tillim became more interested in exploring a sense of place both at home in South Africa and Angola, Congo, and Mozambique. Tillim notes that he was perhaps most influenced by fellow Afrapix member Paul Weinberg and equally importantly, David Goldblatt who has photographed the spaces and architecture of the country for half a century.
Tillim’s evolution as a photographer can be followed through the course of his projects. His journeys into the aftermath of war forced him to question the effectiveness of photography to end conflict and made him attend to the situations of people picking up the pieces of their lives and getting on with living. He writes in Departures, “I was ‘raised’ as a photojournalist, but feelings of impotence in the face of others’ despair, led me to look away, as if catching only obliquely their reflected light. These are photographs of disparate locations, but their justification for ending up in one collection, their basis for comparison is of another nature: disquiet, introspection and wonder.” His images from this period are more contemplative than his previous photojournalism and depict elements of a shot-up landscape where little details tell what happened.
Leopold and Mobutu tells a different story similarly. Here, Tillim focuses his camera on the traces of the horrors of Belgian colonial rule and of the excesses of Mobutu Sese Seko’s maniacal reign that lasted more than thirty years after the assassination of Patrice Lumumba who led the people of the Congo to independence in the late 1950s until his death in 1961. It is a journey into the landscape of a modern day heart of darkness that Roger Casement and Joseph Conrad depicted more than a century ago. Tillim concentrates on the fallen statuary and ruined buildings left by the ruling powers both Belgian and Congolese who presided over the rape of the land and its people. Simple images speak volumes: an ancient baobab bears colonialist graffiti; monuments to King Leopold and Henry Morton Stanley and to slaves and their overlords abound as well as shots of Mobutu’s decaying palaces. Tillim also keeps a humanist eye trained on the people living there, the gold miners, traders, swimmers, child soldiers, and UN troops who attempted to establish some sort of peace in the war torn region.
With Jo’burg, Tillim returned to the city of his birth and explored the changes taking place in “the new South Africa” as it went through the convulsions of economic turmoil, white flight, and the migration of poor blacks into the big city in search of work. His images from this period are marked by the attention to the lives of people living, often squatting illegally, in the largely abandoned high rises and tower blocks of the formerly “white-only” areas. They are portraits, full of hope and despair, of buildings and people that tell of the struggles of everyday men and women trying to make a living, and their beauty and power brought Tillim to the attention of the international art world.
Tillim’s fascination with buildings and how they both shape those living in and around them, as well as symbolic value literally reified and made concrete in them can, of course, be seen throughout his career, but it is no more evident than in his latest, still on-going project, Avenue Patrice Lumumba.
Patrice Lumuba, the man, the legend, is the moving force behind this project. Almost no-one of his generation had the charismatic and polarizing effect as did Patrice Émery Lumumba (2 July 1925 – 17 January 1961). Che Guevara lived longer. Fidel Castro has become a farce. The other heroes of the independence era in Sub-Saharan Africa, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana were far less polarizing, if no less charismatic. They, and Nelson Mandela, lived to tell their tales. But as Tillim puts it in his introduction:
“Who can forget Lumumba’s speech at the independence ceremony in Léopoldville in 1960? Excluded from the official programme, he rose to deliver a tirade in the presence of the Belgian king: ‘We have known sarcasm and insults, endured blows morning, noon and night, because we were “niggers”… We have seen our lands despoiled under the terms of what was supposedly the rule of the land but which only recognized the rule of the strongest.’ His reputation today as an extremist made on that day led directly to his murder, by Belgian agents, in January 1961. Today, Lumumba’s image as a nationalist visionary remains unmolested by the accusations of abuse of power that have become synonymous with later African heads of state.”
Lumumba’s martyrdom endowed his name with near mythic status. In the region, countless roads and buildings, mostly built during the wave of post-colonial independence and euphoria that swept Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, honour him. Notably, whether designed and built by the newly independent states or their Western or Soviet sponsors, many of these edifices were built in a similar, Modernist, style rampant with the concrete and glass that represented Progress with a capital P.
Like the name of the murdered man himself, the architecture evinced the dreams of the era—for freedom, social justice, prosperity, and independence. The history of Angola, Mozambique, Congo, and Madagascar, not to mention Rwanda and Uganda and the other countries bordering the Great Lakes region, has been an almost incessant disaster of civil wars and tribal rivalries sponsored by outside powers wishing to control the area’s natural resources whether through kleptocratic heads of state like Mobuto or the countless warlords who terrorize the people in the regions they control. Thus, the quiet photographs Tillim presents here carry more than an aesthetic burden or a simple aspect of contemporary geo-political history.
Guy Tillim’s images gathered together in this on-going project, Avenue Patrice Lumumba, represent something of the dreams of an era whose concrete manifestations—the Grand Hotel, Beria, Mozambique, an apartment building on the Avenue Kwame Nkrumah in Maputo, Mozambique, the schools, administrative buildings of Lubuashi and Kinshasha in DR Congo, or the memorials to Agostinho Neto of Angola—carry immense symbolic value. Yet, these are not merely reportages from the front lines of the post-colonial Tristes Tropiques, these images also carry the weight of Tillim’s other concerns. These are pictures of people getting on with their lives. For all the mildew-stained concrete—and nothing ages in the tropics worse and faster that cast concrete—there are satellite dishes pointing out of nearly every apartment window alongside drying laundry. If a Parc de Petanque in Porto Rico, Benin, resembles a Roger Fenton from Balaclava, Crimea, it is off-set by workers in various offices or students in seemingly derelict high schools whose architecture would not be out of place in Nanterre or Pointe-a-Pitre. Those pictures of headless statues of colonial era governors with abandoned tires near them may reflect the ominous pursuit of “necklacing” practiced in the townships of South Africa and elsewhere in the 1990s, but they seem somehow mitigated by the wreathes placed next to Neto’s statue in Gabela, Angola. Like the history of South Africa itself, “this is part of my history and my identity, and my imaginary realm.” 
All in all, Guy Tillim consistently depicts not the crushing failures of revolutionary rhetoric and the hopes they inspired along this metaphorical “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”, but the determined efforts of people to keep going. For Tillim, these landscapes and the buildings “help us to understand our history and our identity and our present. They are de facto monuments.” This is no less true of his subjects living around the corner from him or a few hundred kilometers away. It is no less true of Guy Tillim himself. He concludes, “You are surrounded by a million impulses that kind of create a stage on which you live your life. You have to photograph it to see its poetry, its pathos, its schisms. It is expressing what we do. Like life itself, it is an unresolved, on-going project.” 
This body of work was sponsored in part by the award of the first Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography presented by the Peabody Museum, Harvard University to honour Tillim’s humanistic approach to photography for “the photographer who has demonstrated great originality working in the documentary vein.”