Ponte City: Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse

Présentation

Ponte City brings together photographs by artists Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse with found objects, architectural plans, news clippings, and building advertisements they gathered during their multiyear collaboration in Johannesburg, South Africa. At the center of the project is Ponte City, an iconic 54-story residential tower opened in 1975 for an affluent white clientele during apartheid. By the 1990s, sensationalized accounts of crime shaped Ponte’s reputation, even as it was home to a community of South Africans and migrants from across the continent.

Subotzky and Waterhouse began photographing Ponte in 2008, after a major redevelopment came to a halt due to the global financial crisis. Moving between documentary photography, portraiture, typologies, photomontage, and found materials, over the next six years they amassed more than 1,400 images, documents, and ephemera. At once intimate and kaleidoscopic, Ponte City draws on this expansive archive, portraying the building and its residents against South Africa’s history of apartheid and its aftermath. Acquired by SFMOMA in 2018 and presented in its entirety for the first time in the US, Ponte City considers issues of housing, migration, systemic inequality, xenophobia, and the politics of architecture.

The exhibition also features Lindokuhle Sobekwa’s Hostel Strip (2025), an accordion-style photographic book depicting a long stretch of hostels in Thokoza, southeast of Johannesburg. Originally temporary housing for Black male laborers in the apartheid economy, the hostels have become permanent, generational homes for families and a larger working-class community. Set against Ponte’s verticality, Sobekwa’s horizontal streetscape shows how a different form of apartheid urban planning, one built for Black workers, has been transformed into a place of belonging by its residents.