Johannesburg Inner-City Works (2000 - 2004)

Developed alongside inner-city regeneration initiatives such as the Joubert Park Public Art Project (2000–2002) and Tour Guides of the Inner City (Urban Futures 2000), Johannesburg Inner-City Works reflects Jo Ractliffe’s sustained engagement with the shifting urban landscape of Johannesburg. Using a Holga camera, she produced a distinctive archive of images characterized by soft focus, vignetting, and panoramic stitching, creating a “half-seen” aesthetic that captures the city as a place of slippages; unstable, fleeting, and in motion. These images informed projects including the collaborative film One Year Later (2001).

The series documents streets and intersections across Johannesburg’s inner city and adjacent neighborhoods, including Jeppe Street corner West Street (Ferreiras-Dorp), Market Street corner Kort Street (Marshaltown), Marshall Street (Johannesburg Central), Goch Street corner Bree Street, Carr Street, and Goch Street (Newtown), Simmonds Street corner Market Street, Rissik Street, Pritchard Street (Johannesburg Central), and Wolmarans, King George, and Twist Streets in Joubert Park.

Ractliffe’s photographs emphasize atmosphere and movement over precise detail, rendering architectural forms, street surfaces, vehicles, and pedestrians with a blurred, almost transient quality. This approach conveys the lived experience of the city, reflecting the fleeting impressions, peripheral glimpses, and dynamic rhythms of urban life. It allows the viewer to sense temporal and social layers; the interplay of history, ongoing activity, and human movement, rather than presenting a fixed or purely documentary view.

The images highlight both everyday life and the broader historical and social contexts of Johannesburg: the legacies of apartheid spatial planning, the central role of taxis and informal transport, urban regeneration initiatives, and the layered use of public and residential spaces such as Joubert Park. Through this nuanced lens, the series presents Johannesburg not as static or fixed, but as a complex, dynamic, and continually transforming city, revealing its temporal, social, and psychological dimensions. From this series, the Constitutional Court Art Collection holds six works from the first edition set.

References

Diaz Morales, S. & Ractliffe, J. (2001) One Year Later [film]. Johannesburg.

Joubert Park Public Art Project (2000–2002) Project materials and documentation. Johannesburg.

Ractliffe, J. (2004) Johannesburg Inner City Works [exhibition statement].

Stevenson (2011) Jo Ractliffe: Johannesburg Inner City Works 2000–2004 [online exhibition]. Available at: https://archive.stevenson.info/exhibitions/ractliffe/index_johannesburg.html (Accessed: 05 November 2025).

Urban Futures (2000) Tour Guides of the Inner City [exhibition]. Curated by S. Hobbs. Johannesburg.