Svea Josephy, The Park, 2025.

Cities of the Future - In the Past

by Svea Josephy

Long Gallery: 02.10.25 - 13.11.25

Cities of the future in the past explores the relationship between photography and the spatial-planning disciplines.  In this exhibition I present twelve cyanotypes, several ambrotypes, AI images, a relief and two freestanding sculptures. Each visual language speaks to a different aspect of art and photography and its entanglement in the recording of space. Some of these photographs represent a fantasy, an imaginary assemblage of pasts and present cities, specific buildings like Ponte Tower in Hillbrow or the Disa Towers in Vredehoek, others are a fictionized collage of structures that don’t exist.­­

The exhibition uses the registers of architecture and photography for a critical exploration of details of the South African urban landscape and how it is constructed. It focusses on four South African cities as a way of thinking through some of the inheritances of the past, present, and future. It imagines other futures for alternative pasts.

What will cities of the future look like when they have been erased or subsumed by other structures, social upheavals or environmental catastrophe? What will the cities of the future look like when laminated on to the modern heritage of the present? I employ the orthographic projections of the plan, the model, and the photograph, several photographic and design modes including: the glass plate method of the ambrotype, the cyanotype (the blueprint), the architectural model, my own photographic depictions of the model, and the computer-generated forms through 3D printed models and AI generated photographs.

Some of these expressions use a camera and others are cameraless forms of photography. The plan and the model are always in the future, the photograph often in the past, and AI, like the plan and the model are part of the imaginary, rather than the lived reality of space and place.

In this exhibition, I present aspects of my decade long engagement with speculative photography to consider the pasts and futures of some South African cities.