Artist 121
Guy Tillim Photography
Tillim was born in Johannesburg in 1962 and lives in Vermaaklikheid in South Africa. He started photographing professionally in 1986, working with the Afrapix collective until 1990.
He works as a freelance photographer in South Africa for the local and foreign media.
Guy Tillim is a great figure of the contemporary South-African photographic scene. He began as a young reporter in the 1980’s, when he became aware of photography as a way to fight against the racial gap created by the Apartheid in his country: “the camera is the ideal tool to transcend those borders, to see what happened in my own country”.
For years, Tillim photographed documentary projects of visual and historical strength to create testimonies to the social conflict and inequalities prevailing in South Africa.
In those pictures, blunt and dark colours appear suddenly from a damp grey background, in an imitative harmony with the harshness of its subjects.
I think this is a sensitive exploration of the use of Abject in not that the subjects are other but reflecting especially during apartheid art that reflected the abject struggle of the time.
The photos have a solemnness to them which is very powerful in its silence.
