South African photographer Guy Tillim was appointed winner of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson 2017 Prize. Born in Johannesburg in 1962, Guy Tillim discovered photography in 1986 and worked for four years with the collective Afrapix. As an independent photographer, he leads missions in Africa for Reuters and AFP. In 2002, he received the SCAM Roger Pic Award. In 2006, he was the first recipient of the Robert Gardner Fellowship Award from the Harvard Museum of Photography.
His project Museum of the Revolution won the jury membership, which was composed of Lorenza Bravetta (adviser to Minister Franceschini in Italy), Clément Chéroux (SFMOMA), Pierre-Alexis Dumas (Hermès), Florian Ebner (Center Pompidou ), Nathalie Giraudeau (Ile-de-France Photographic Center), Thyago Nogueira (Institut Moreira Salles and ZUM Magazine) and Agnès Sire (HCB Foundation).
With Museum of the Revolution, Guy Tillim looks at the streets of Maputo, Nairobi, Harare and tries to unveil both the inheritance of past and present history. Their arteries bear the traces of the colonialist past, their Marxist heritage, slightly shifting to economic liberalism these past years. As Clément Chéroux describes his work, Guy “Tillim is interested here in the urban space as an area of inscription in which the traces of the colonial past reveal themselves and where the new political orientations assert themselves. ‘After David Goldblatt, who profoundly marked the South African photographic scene of the 1990s and 2000s. ”
