Guy Tillim

The images of the South African photographer Guy Tillim (1962, Johannesburg) display an analytical precision that never fails to stir up the emotions. His photographic career began in the latter years of apartheid, and this period continues to affect his work. In the ten short years that he has worked as a freelance photographer for local and foreign media, including Reuters and Agence France Presse, he has moved away from photojournalism and towards a much more humane and subtle approach to his themes. After the successful publication of Congo Democratic in 2006 Guy Tillim decided to pursue a non-political subject, and in 2010 he bought a catamaran and sailed from New Zealand to the Polynesian islands. In the wake of the British explorer Captain James Cook (1728–1779), and more than a century after the painter Paul Gauguin (and numerous other artists), he sought to portray the modern landscapes of these ‘paradise islands’. His intensely light, vividly colourful, windblown landscapes occasionally call to mind the paintings of the Douanier Rousseau, but Guy Tillim ’s photographs also reveal these landscapes as being new, up to date, and full of life. These are images that live long in the mind. They also advance the art of photography, for Guy Tillim ’s work seems to have liberated the genre of landscape photography from every cliché that had ever crept in over the years. In collaboration with the Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town. A book with the same name will be published in 2012 by Prestel Verlag.

Artists: Guy Tillim