Wolmarans St, Joubert Park

Jo Ractliffe’s photograph captures Wolmarans Street and the surrounding area of Joubert Park in Johannesburg’s inner city during the early 2000s. The work is a panoramic composition created from several individual frames stitched together, producing a slightly fragmented, non-linear view of the urban landscape.

The street-level scenes depict tall buildings, intersections, and sparse trees silhouetted against the light, with overhead street lighting and electrical wires punctuating the scene. Ractliffe employed a low-fidelity Holga camera, giving the image a distinctive “half-seen” quality, with soft focus, muted edges, and occasional vignetting. This technique conveys Johannesburg as a “city of slippages,” a place that resists fixed meaning, where familiar and unfamiliar elements merge and shift in perception.

The photograph emphasizes both human-made and natural elements, juxtaposing modern architecture and infrastructure with trees and open spaces in Joubert Park. It reflects the inner city during a period of regeneration, capturing streets and parkland as dynamic, lived environments. Ractliffe’s work invites viewers to experience the city not as static or ordered, but as a complex, layered space shaped by history, activity, and ongoing change.