Strauss & co - 5 June 2017, Johannesburg

230 260 Greg Marinovich SOUTH AFRICAN 1962– Dead Zone a portfolio of 41 digital photographic prints with accompanying texts by Greg Marinovich and introductions by Sean O’Toole and Karel Nel each signed, dated, numbered 3/5 and inscribed with their respective titles in pencil each sheet size: 46 by 60 cm R250 000 – 350 000 Following the unbanning of 33 political parties and release of political prisoners in 1990, in the protracted lead-up to non-racial elections in 1994, South Africa teetered on the brink. The topography of war in this portfolio includes a cramped Thokoza hostel, a rain-soaked street in Duduza west of Nigel, a Bantustan capital in the Eastern Cape, a rural valley north of Durban, and Shell House in Jeppe Street, Johannesburg. In a 1994 article for Leadership magazine, Marinovich collectively described these places as the ‘dead zone’. While Thokoza, a working-class settlement southeast of Johannesburg that was a fulcrum for his best work, may well be a ‘forgotten battlefield from a forgotten conflict’, as Marinovich proposes in a caption, his photographs are less sceptical. They offer unflinching witness to the painful becoming of a nation.