Edit Beijing

Edit Beijing collects street photographs Guy Tillim made over a two-week residency in Beijing, working closer to his subjects than in the wide cityscapes of his earlier African work.

Tillim shot the series and, with designer Syb Kuiper, edited it down into a sequence that places photographs side by side as if forming a single continuous scene, though each is in fact a discrete image. "The more visible you are to people in the streets, the more invisible, in a certain sense, you become," Tillim has said of the shift toward standing in plain sight with a tripod-mounted camera rather than working from a distance. Editions Bessard published the hardback in 2017 in a limited edition of 500 copies, designed by Kuiper and issued in a slipcase.

Tillim, born in Johannesburg, is known for photographic surveys of African cities in transition, including Avenue Patrice Lumumba and Museum of the Revolution; Edit Beijing applies the same eye for architecture and public space to a different continent, at closer range.