Ponte City

Ponte Tower has stood over Johannesburg since 1975 as a monument to changing fortune. It was built as luxury apartments for the city's white elite, left to decline and gain a reputation for crime and squalor after apartheid ended, and later partially reclaimed through redevelopment. Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse spent years inside it, and Ponte City is the record of that time.

The two photographers set themselves a systematic task: photograph every door in the building, the view out of every window, and the image showing on every television screen. They combined those series with an extensive found archive of real-estate brochures, newspaper clippings, security-company documents, and lost identity photographs recovered from the tower's abandoned units. Steidl published the material as a box of seventeen booklets stacked one on top of another, mimicking the stacked floors of the tower itself, rather than binding it into a single volume. An accompanying text by the Johannesburg writer Ivan Vladislavić threads the building's mythology and its residents' testimony through the visual archive. The result treats a single structure as a lens onto the whole arc of the city's post-apartheid transformation.

Subotzky (b. 1981) is a former Magnum photographer known for long-term projects inside South African institutions. Waterhouse (b. 1981) is a British artist and former editor of Colors magazine. The two developed Ponte City together over roughly a decade. A related, expanded volume, Ponte City Revisited, followed from Steidl in 2021.