GROUP EXHIBITION

Foregrounding the work of local and international photographers, the exhibition reasserts the photographer’s role not merely as observer or documentarian, but as a critical agent as producer of realities. In an era increasingly shaped by algorithms and AI-generated image culture, the analogue eye—still human, still flawed—is newly urgent. Against the seamless manipulations of artificial intelligence, these photographers hold fast to subjectivity, to memory, and to the tactile conditions of reality.

Here, photography is positioned as a medium of resistance and remembrance: a tool for mapping the contours of lived experience, confronting historical erasures, and imagining speculative futures. The camera becomes both mirror and mechanism—one that refracts and refigures the world.

The exhibition engages the idea of “heritage” not as a fixed or institutionalised construct, but as an evolving terrain—found in the pulse of the street, the temporality of landscapes, and the socio-political resonances of daily life. This notion, aligned with the Cape Town Photography Festival’s thematic focus, is treated as something not merely to be archived, but actively cultivated and protected.

Through this lens, the photographer is not only witness, but also seer—interweaving memory, fiction, and truth in equal measure. The works on view speak to photography’s capacity to hold space for multiplicity: of perspective, of time, of form. The exhibition features local and international photographers, who will be formally announced in the weeks ahead.

In conjunction with the exhibition, THK Gallery will present a curated selection of seminal photography publications, including volumes on Douglas Kirkland, Annie Leibovitz, David Bailey as well as Helmut Newton’s SUMO, Dennis Hopper’s Photographs 1961–1967, and Steve McCurry’s Afghanistan, among others.

More than a presentation of photographic works, this exhibition is a meditation on vision and the evolving politics of image- making—a vital contribution for collectors, readers, and thinkers alike.