It must be built from ashes
Justin Keene, a documentary photographer based between the UK and South Africa. His current body of work examines family archives and their connection to South Africa’s mining industry — exploring the dominant industry’s effect on both social and physical landscapes in the country.
Photos Justin Keene
Keene’s work reviews formal structures of image-making after a history of documentary realism in South Africa. This Cape Town based project, It Must Be Built From Ashes, challenges the mainstream media portrayal of Mitchells Plain and the Cape Flats, creating an intimate social dialogue with communities and their youth to explore interpretations of home and a sense of belonging.
Mitchells Plain, on the outskirts of Cape Town, is a purpose-built relocation area that developed following forced removals from Cape Town’s inner-city during the country’s apartheid regime. The project evaluates the notion of citizenship and place-related identity — challenging theories of representation to create a renewed visual economy for the area and its people. Justin’s work aims to confront the ethics of viewership in South Africa by questioning our global presence in the production of a postcolony, whilst interpreting a sense of self in modern-day South Africa.
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