Stunning stuff at the Photographer’s Gallery for the DB Prize this year. I loved the presentation of the images of people living in an abandoned tower block in Johannesburg. An extraordinary cylindrical building with a space-age feel, Ponte City was originally built for the white elite under apartheid, but became run down and crime-filled in the 1990s before developers bought the building and began evicting its residents. Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse have compiled these haunting, poignant and everyday scenes in backlit, floor-to-ceiling frames, almost like giant contact sheets.
Viviane Sassen plays with realism and abstraction, using contrasting colours and textures (as well as a variety of mediums) to look at light and colour. I was very taken with her arrangement of bold abstract geometric – almost 3D – forms which feature splashes of bright colour.
hannahbailey.org 