Some South African Country Towns

Taken over a ten-year period, between 2012 and 2022, this series of photographs is from a project on South African country villages and towns. The majority of the images are of small Karoo towns, and many of these in turn are of the Dutch Reformed Churches whose steeples are visible for miles around in the vast, semi-desert region that lies, metaphorically and geographically, at South Africa’s centre.

There is something about these Karoo towns, in particular, that has always spoken to me - the stillness of the empty streets in the heat of the day, the white, shuttered cottages, the big skies overhead. And always, at the edge of town, or sprawling out into the arid land, the coloured settlement or African location. In South Africa, as elsewhere, as Faulkner wrote, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’