Photopaper 64/65 – Guy Tillim

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Photopaper 64/65 – Guy Tillim Dar es Salaam and Abidjan

»In Dar es Salaam and Abidjan I indulged a simple idea that if you’ve ever been a photographer, I’m sure has crossed your mind: and that is to combine elements from different frames into one picture. I’ve spent years on street corners, and walking streets trying to convey just ordinary scenes, little daily events that happened by the million. And yet, a part of me wanted to capture something out of the ordinary, or rather something so particularly ordinary that it had effortless grace and an effortless path to oblivion. Which always seemed so extremely difficult and sometimes tortuous. You’d spend hours and days, and then hate yourself because you just couldn’t do it, and photographers you admired were seemingly doing it all the time. So I constructed the images. Because I can. Because I wanted to see what they looked like. You note a little defensiveness in my tone there? My former practiice of photojournalism disapproved of this kind of construction, saw it as disingenuous: a single moment should be able to be plucked out from its journey to oblivion and be consecrated as ‘something that happened’. I suppose it’s a play on with time really. The scenes all happened, not in that sequence maybe, but with another throw of the dice, who knows?«
— Guy Tillim