Guy Tillim

Petros Village, Chimombo Chikwahira. Malawi, 2006

The South African photographer Guy Tillim defines his artistic approach at the delicate borderline between empathy and alienation. His travels through the countries of Africa are not dictated by pre-arranged goals. They seem to be guided by a quality of attention, unprejudiced at first, to the conditions and environments that people have brought about themselves, and that, equally, they are placed in. Tillim is not looking for the ‘correct’, the ‘successful’ motif, he lets the images find him, as it were, lets them come up to him so that he can then circle around them at the same time, deliberately, and then portray them. In February 2006 the African aid organisation “Dream” invited Guy Tillim to spend one week in Petros Village, Malawi. From the series of photographs that arose here, the artist has selected around 30 works for a book object of the same title, ten of which have been purchased for the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection. In his photographs, Guy Tillim portrays everyday life in the small Petros Village, and with his analytical and emphatically penetrating gaze renders transparent the clichés of poverty and Aids in terms of their individually fateful nature.