ALTERNATE VIEW
A city is not a single entity, but a contested idea. The title ‘Number One City’ is an act of definition, a projection that selects one reality and discards another. Alternate View, is an inquiry into this act of selection. It questions the comfortable coherence of the image presented to the world – an image of natural beauty and cosmopolitan success – by juxtaposing it with the disparate realities it excludes.
The dominant visual syntax of Cape Town is Table Mountain. It is a geological monolith, simplifying the city’s identity into a single, marketable symbol. In Alternate View, the mountain functions as a constant – a non-negotiable presence against which human truths are measured. My method is to invert the conventional gaze, treating the mountain not as the subject, but as a silent referent for the complex social geographies at its base. The foreground is my subject: the informal architectures, the human density, and the enduring legacy of spatial apartheid.
The project examines the paradox of a city celebrated for its quality of life while manifesting some of the world’s most acute symptoms of social collapse: extreme crime rates, endemic gangsterism, and pervasive gender-based violence. These are not aberrations; they are the logical outcomes of a system defined by profound structural inequality.Alternate View is a photographic inquiry into these disparities.
The photographs explore the visual evidence of this schism, where wealth and poverty exist in close proximity, yet in separate, parallel worlds.
This state of dualism is accelerated by current dynamics. The ‘semigration’ of South Africans seeking functional governance and the influx of foreign capital into the property market are not neutral events. They are forces that reinforce the abstract, idealized version of Cape Town. For the city’s majority, however, this reinforcement translates into material consequence: rising costs, displacement, and a deeper entrenchment of the periphery. One reality is fortified at the expense of the other.
The fundamental question this work poses is one of ontology: Can a single place exist as two irreconcilable states of being? What happens when the curated image of a city becomes more influential than its lived reality for most of its inhabitants? The future of Cape Town is contingent on the answer. An identity built on such a fractured foundation is inherently unstable.
Alternate View, therefore, is not a simple exposé of “the other side.” It is an interrogation of the act of seeing itself. It challenges the viewer to move beyond the passive consumption of celebrated images and to confront the politics of the frame – to ask not only what we are looking at, but from where we are looking, and what is deliberately left unseen.