Reviews

1.

“Mark Lewis’s distinctive depth of field.” Read this fine review of Mark Lewis’s work in the Wake Up this is Joburg series: “Mark Lewis ghosts through the streets of inner-city Joburg with his camera, often catching people off guard, between heartbeats, between coughing and choking, between laughing hard and falling down.”
https://www.businesslive.co.za/fm/life/art/2017-12-21-photography-mark-lewiss-distinctive-depth-of-field/

2.

Terry Kurgan’s Hotel Yeoville, and Up Up: Stories of Johannesburg Highrises edited by Nele Dechmann, Fabian Jaggi, Katrin Murbach and Nicola Ruffo are included in this interesting academic article on the subject of “Writing Johannesburg” by Naomi Roux.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0725513617720314

3.

Another insightful review of our publication Commonplace, this time by Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Director of Exhibitions and Collections for the Walther Collection in New York.
https://aperture.org/blog/family-photographs-south-africa/

4.

Terry Kurgan’s “Everyone is Present” by Africa in Words . Scholar and writer Andrew van der Vlies has written an insightful, in-depth review of Terry Kurgan’s new book: “Terry Kurgan is one of South Africa’s most accomplished and sophisticated theorists of her own photographic practice. Her projects, both studio-based and publicly engaged, have frequently explored the mediations of power relations at play in domestic photography. In Everyone is Present she offers a set of sensitive readings of a small cache of family photographs from the mid to late 1930s and early 1940s as its own kind of experimental art practice. The result is a deeply personal meditation on authorship, memory, and photography.”
https://africainwords.com/2019/04/15/review-terry-kurgans-everyone-is-present/#more-19748

5.

Art Historian Michael Godby’s incisively perceptive and glowing review of Commonplace, which is edited by Tamsyn Adams and Sophie Feyder.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00043389.2017.1338646

6.

Read Keeping your hat on in Jo’burg: changing times of an Indian Milliner. This fabulous piece by Professor Dilip Menon (Director of the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa, University of the Witwatersrand) both reviews and contextualises Tanya Zack and Mark Lewis’s Master Mansions, book # 8 in the Wake up this is Joburg series.
https://theconversation.com/keeping-your-hat-on-in-joburg-changing-times-of-an-indian-migrant-milliner-79681

7.

In this interview, Joana Choumali discusses the different stages of her work on the sensitive portraits in her book Hââbré, The Last Generation, and her more general aim to portray an evolving Africa that is both ordinary and nuanced.
http://blog.leica-camera.com/2015/02/04/joana-choumali-haabre-the-last-generation/

8.

Home, family and intimacy in recent writings on and from South Africa, by Carli Coetzee.
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/656706/pdf

9.

Is Andrew Tshabangu the unsung hero of South African Photography?
In “The Value of Andrew Tshabangu’s Photography,” an essay in our monograph on the photographer’s work, the curator, critic and novelist Simon Njami tells us that Tshabangu’s journey began in the place where he was born, namely, South Africa. “While biography is never a trivial part of the analysis of any artist’s work,” Njami writes, “in Tshabangu’s case the contextual elements seem to render fundamental clues to a deeper understanding of his universe.” Read more of Bongani Madondo’s review of Tshabangu’s monograph Footprints here.
https://aperture.org/blog/andrew-tshabangu-unsung-hero-south-african-photography/

10.

What a wonderful start to 2016!! The Sunday Times published a full-page excerpt from Tea At Anstey’s in this past weekend’s Opinion and Analysis section. This is the 6th book of the almost entirely sold out 10 part series Wake Up,This is Joburg. We still have a few available to purchase online or from our Braamfontein shop. And we are working towards book 7.
http://www.timeslive.co.za/…/Elegant-icon-of-a-citys-roller…

11.

Writer, artist and research associate at the University of Cape Town’s African Centre for Cities (ACC), Kim Gurney has penned a new book on the evolving art space, August House in Johannesburg.

August House is Dead, Long Live August House! The Story of a Johannesburg Atelier, published by FourthWall Books, is a fascinating study of the role of the atelier and its artists in South Africa’s fractious art world, and a consideration of the relationship between art and the ever-changing city of Johannesburg.

Gurney talks to UrbanAfrica about her personal relationship with the building, the city and the genesis of the book.
https://www.urbanafrica.net/news/august-house-art-city-making-meet/

12.

Read this review to see why Stephanus Muller’s three-volume publication “Nagmusiek” brought such extraordinary innovation to the literary canon, and was deemed worthy of two book awards in November! The prestigious 2015 Jan Rabie Rapport Prize for fiction as well as the 2015 KykNET Report Book Award for non-fiction.
http://bookslive.co.za/…/hoe-kon-nagmusiek-deur-stephanus-…/

13.

Is it a novel or a biography or an artists’ book hybrid? Nagmusiek, the exquisitely designed and produced three-volume set is from the wonderful South African publisher Fourthwall Books. http://highveldreadingandwritingstudios.com/2015/11/24/writerswhoare/

14.

Times Live have reviewed our recently launched Tea at Anstey’s. “If you are invited to tea at Anstey’s, say yes. It’s an invitation to slip away from the street-level maelstrom of Joubert Street life and enter a building that’s something unexpected in inner-city Johannesburg.”
http://www.timeslive.co.za/…/City-Jewel-Ansteys-has-storeys…

15.

Jeffrey Ladd reviews our recent publication of Jason Larkin’s Waiting in 1000 words Magazine: “Waiting for something in our lives is perhaps one of the most universally understood occurrences. Everyday, we wait in some way or another for something – a phone call, an email, for our loved ones to arrive, for the rain to stop.” http://www.1000wordsmag.com/jason-larkin/

16.

Lisa King is the winner of the inaugural Fourthwall Books Photobook Award, supporting work on contemporary Africa, and “Sometimes I Make Money One Day of the Week” was published in September 2015. “Until 2014, the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange was one of the last in the world to use a manual trading system, with stockbrokers calling out their trades while seated at a large oval table. A single typist recorded transactions that were then displayed on a wall monitor. The medium format images Zimbabwe-born photographer Lisa King (now based in South Africa) made within the low-ceilinged room that housed the exchange capture the intense focus of the brokers who, for a few hours each day, were connected to the world economy.” http://potd.pdnonline.com/2015/10/34384/