GUY TILLIM AT HAUNCH OF VENISON, ZURICH

GUY TILLIM

Guy Tillim (born 1962) has been acclaimed in recent years for extraordinary images taken in Africa, in the fractured territories of Sierra Leone, Eritrea, the DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo) and Angola and the urban centres of Johannesburg and Kinshasa. While Tillim trained as a photojournalist his work transcends the documentary impulse to offer profound insights into the contemporary African condition, finding revelatory beauty in the mundane (and often terrible) actuality of life there. Tillim says: 'Of course, there is always this: to change what is ugly and brutal into something sublime and redemptive: So I have photographs I like for reasons I have come to distrust. I learned my trade as a photojournalist but feelings of impotence in the face of other's despair led me to look away, as if catching only obliquely their reflected light.’ His images are, in the artist's formulation, of 'another nature: disquiet, introspection, wonder'.

Renate Wiehager has written: 'It can be said of Guy Tillim that his artistic approach is formulated on the tricky border between empathy and distancing. His travels through the countries of southern Africa are not dictated by pre-arranged goals. They seem to be guided by a quality of attention, unprejudiced at first, to the conditions and environments that people have brought about themselves, and that equally, they are placed in [..] Tillim's images derive from a disciplined avoidance of everything that has always been believed before, and any form of painting things in black and white.'

Tillim was born in Johannesburg in 1962.(MORE...)

HAUNCH OF VENISON