Dunes Encroaching on Sun Shelters at the Beach, Port Elizabeth, South Africa

Artist Graeme Williams South African, born 1961

Date2010, printed 2016

MediumArchival digital print on Hahnemühle photo rag paper

DimensionsPaper: 36 x 36 in. (91.4 x 91.4 cm)
Frame: 40 5/16 x 40 1/16 x 2 in. (102.4 x 101.8 x 5.1 cm)

ClassificationsPhotography

Credit LinePurchased with funds from the African and African American Purchase Fund

Object number2016.15.2

On View

Not on view

Label TextWilliams’s photography captures incomplete or abandoned spaces—devoid of the bodies that should be or were once encountered there. The modernist aesthetic of these cement sun shelters brutally contrasts with the stark, bleached sands of Port Elizabeth.

Found throughout the continent of Africa and the world, modernist architecture is often associated with such poured-concrete structures, and its rise coincided with the height of South Africa’s apartheid system of legally enforced racial segregation (1950s-1980s). Williams may here be alluding to apartheid’s migrant labor system that forced black South Africans to commute from townships to work in mines or cities—leaving them no time or place for pleasure.ProvenanceCreated Port Elizabeth, South Africa, 2010; collection of the artist; [Axis Gallery, West Orange, NJ]; sold to NCMA, 2016. Object Rights Statement

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