Ponte City Revisited

Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse worked at Ponte City, the iconic Johannesburg apartment building and Africa's tallest residential skyscraper, for more than six years. There they photographed its residents and exhaustively documented the building. Every door, the view from every window, the image on every television screen. This remarkable body of photographs appears here in counterpoint to an extensive archive of found material and historical documents; a sustained sequence of essays and documentary texts is also integrated into the visual story. 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.