The makeshift settlements, built on the salt flats beyond Cape Town, became dense, improvised communities. Lurie’s photographs reflect the complexity of life in these spaces – hardship and ingenuity, tension and resilience – with a clear-eyed attention to the human presence within the shifting political landscape. The accompanying exhibition text by Rian Malan described the area as “a metropolis of shacks and shanties, as densely packed and alley-riven as a walled medieval city,” populated by a mix of marginalised individuals and ordinary workers navigating precarious lives.

The exhibition was shown at Side Gallery in 1990, part of its ongoing commitment to showing international documentary work that addressed urgent social realities. Lurie’s images, set against the backdrop of apartheid’s slow unravelling, offered UK audiences a visceral portrait of urban life on the edge of political change.

David Lurie is a South African photographer whose documentary work explores the political, social and spatial legacies of apartheid. Born in Cape Town in 1951, he studied economics, politics and philosophy before moving to London in the 1980s, later returning to South Africa to focus full-time on photography. His work, often centred on urban landscapes, inequality and contested public spaces, brings a critical and reflective eye to the tensions shaping post-apartheid society.

Self-taught as a photographer, Lurie began working seriously in the early 1990s, with major projects such as Life in the Liberated Zone, Cape Town Fringe and Struggling to Share the Promised Land. His images are analytical and formally composed, often working between portraiture, street photography and landscape to map the visual geography of social change.