Traffic | 2016
TRAFFIC documents the daily journey millions of South Africans make in minibus taxis a fast, flexible transport network that shapes our streets and social life.
Photographed entirely on an iPhone 6, the work stays close, shoulder to shoulder with commuters, watching, listening and following the light through vinyl decals.
People moving together. The exhibition examines public transport, commuter culture, and the visual language of South African cities.
In South Africa, minibus taxis are more than vehicles, they are a language of motion.
TRAFFIC listens for that language, hand signals at the curb, the Gaatjies's call, the shuffle of small coins. The choice of the iPhone 6 matters. It lets the camera be a fellow passenger rather than an intrusion, and it embraces the atmosphere, the grain of low light, the glint off a rear-view mirror, reflections that turn windows into layered scenes.
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The work sits at the intersection of documentary and street photography. It looks for story in the ordinary, a driver’s glance the wait at a rank as taxis line up like lego blocks. All different, all with a place.
Landscapes appear in fragments, the edge of a township, the lift of a highway, a skyline cut by power lines because that is how commuters see the city, through windows, in motion.
TRAFFIC gathers these fragments into a portrait of a social system that is both improvised and highly disciplined, a choreography performed every day by vehicles, routes and people.
The exhibition also considers the politics of proximity.
Public transport is where strangers occupy the same breath. Here, the camera works with care avoiding spectacle and staging, favouring patience and dignity.
TRAFFIC asks viewers to notice how we travel, Traffic asks us to see, to look, to be to be seen.
Minibus taxis are debated, regulated, celebrated. They move workers, students, shoppers, families.
By tracing this flow, TRAFFIC maps a visual grammar of South African urban life,
Curated with Khanyisile Mbongwa and presented with Puncture Points, TRAFFIC is an invitation to look again at transport as community, at movement as memory, at the everyday as art.
