WITNESS

Witness interrogate what it means to see, to remember, and to attend in an age when images circulate faster than truths can settle. Working across portraiture, architecture, intimacy, and performance, their approaches challenge photography’s supposed neutrality, proposing instead a politics of relation and presence.

Johno Mellish (b. 1991) works with ambiguity and atmosphere. His quiet, ordinary-seeming images resist easy narrative, drawing viewers into suspended moments that unsettle and refuse closure.

Nonzuzo Gxekwa (b. 1981) builds her practice around intimacy and care. Her portraits and street photographs reclaim the Black subject from extractive histories, offering instead a relational gaze grounded in opacity, tenderness, and resistance.

Kuba Freter (b. 1995) turns his lens to architectural details and the traces of human presence. Through thresholds, walls, and diffused light, his photographs hold memory and time, evoking the poetics of the unnoticed.

Douglas Kirkland (1934–2022) is celebrated for his iconic portraits of cultural figures across decades. His images foreground the photographer as witness to performance and persona, offering an enduring record of presence within shifting cultural landscapes.

Manyatsa Monyamane (b. 1989) works with portraiture to explore identity, memory, and intergenerational narratives. Her images reflect on contemporary Black experience while drawing on archival textures that bridge past and present.

Together, these artists offer Witness as a proposition: not photography as evidence, but as relation. Their works ask us to remain with the image, to hold its dissonance, and to see differently.