At birth, Andrew Tshabangu was already an outcast, having been rendered a trespasser in his own city
by the inglorious scheme of apartheid. Yet decades later, Tshabangu continues to bring an unparalleled aesthetic commitment to Johannesburg. Working primarily in black and white, one imagines him roving through streets named after long-dead Dutch and British men as a custodian of the city’s always already shattered dreams and aspirations. Tshabangu’s imperative is to cast the ‘city of gold’ in as many shades of grey as captured in his photos of it. ‘One of the functions of images’, Teju Cole writes in Human Archipelago (2018), ‘is to re-enchant the ordinary’. If the position of official visual chronicler and enchanter-in-chief for Johannesburg were to be announced, Tshabangu would be an obvious contender. Few others know and see the city—infamous for its healed (and fresh) wounds—the way that he does. Tshabangu’s oeuvre is an incadescent filter: his images are soft, always glowing with an improbable serenity and calmness, no matter the subject. Nevertheless, Tshabangu’s motifs are not fictional; he seeks them out, approaching his ever-growing body of work as a way of seeing. Dodging multiple alternative careers in priesthood, banking, or performance arts, and pursuing a non- linear path to photography, Tshabangu’s work is still a calling of sorts, a coming-to-terms with the dynamism of syncretic spiritual practices and the oft-maligned pan-African jewel.

Works in the exhibition: Bridges (1995–2016), series of photographs, print on AluDibond. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Momo