Wake Up, This Is Joburg

A single image taken from a high rise building in inner city Johannesburg reveals layers of history—from its premise and promise of gold to its current improvisations. It reveals the city as carcass and as crucible, where informal agents and processes spearhead its rapid reshaping and transformation. In Wake Up, This is Joburg, writer Tanya Zack and photographer Mark Lewis offer a stunning portrait of Johannesburg and personal stories of some of the city’s ordinary, odd, and outrageous residents. Their photos and essays take readers into meat markets, where butchers chop cow heads; the eclectic home of an outsider artist that’s full of turrets and manikins; long abandoned gold pits beneath the city where people continue to informally mine; and into lively markets, taxi depots, and residential high rises. Sharing people’s private and work lives and the extraordinary spaces of the metropolis, Zack and Lewis show that Johannesburg’s urban transformation occurs not in a series of dramatic, widescale changes but in the everyday lives, actions, and dreams of individuals.