I Photographed the Same Corner of Commissioner Street for Ten Years Before I Lived On It

The Corner I Kept Going Back To

The first photograph I ever sold was of a man fixing a shoe on the corner of Commissioner and Rissik. He sat on an upturned paint tin with a last between his knees, and behind him the light came down the street in a long gold blade the way it only does in winter, when the sun is low enough to slip between the buildings. I took it on a Canon my uncle had given me with a cracked lens hood, and a magazine paid me eight hundred rand for it. I was twenty-four. I thought I was going to be famous by thirty.

I am thirty-four now and I am not famous, but I still go back to that corner. For ten years I went back to it from Soshanguve, which meant a taxi at ten to five, a train when the trains were running, and another taxi when they were not. I knew the CBD the way a fisherman knows a bay he does not live beside. I knew where the light fell at seven and where it fell at four. I knew which hawkers would let me photograph them and which would throw a peach pip at me. What I did not know was what the city sounded like at midnight, or at three in the morning, because by then I was always on a seat that smelled of diesel, going home.

What Commuting Does to a Photographer

People who do not commute think the cost is money. The money is real, I spent close to two thousand rand a month just getting in and out, but the bigger cost is the light. The best hour in Johannesburg is the first one, when the street sweepers are out and the shop shutters are still half down and the whole downtown smells of wet concrete and vetkoek oil. I could almost never be there for it. By the time I arrived, the good light was gone and the crowds were up, and I spent my days chasing pictures that had already happened.

My girlfriend at the time, Lerato, used to say I had a long-distance relationship with a street corner. She meant it as a joke, and then one day she did not mean it as a joke, and that was the end of that. I do not blame her. I was always leaving early and coming home late and talking about buildings.

The Night I Missed the Last Taxi

The thing that changed it was small. In June last year I stayed too long photographing a choir rehearsing on the steps of an old bank building, a group of women in maroon who sang every Thursday for reasons nobody could quite explain to me. By the time I packed up, the last taxi to my side of Tshwane had gone. I slept on the floor of a friend's studio in Maboneng with my camera bag under my head, and at five in the morning I walked out into the street and saw my city in a way I had never seen it.

It was cold enough to see my breath. A man was hosing down the pavement outside a fruit shop and the water was steaming. Two security guards were sharing a flask. The sky above Carlton Centre was the colour of a bruise going yellow. I shot four rolls of film in an hour, more than I usually shot in a week, and when I developed them, three of the frames were the best things I had ever made.

I sat in my mother's kitchen that weekend and told her I wanted to move into town. She put down her tea and looked at me like I had said I wanted to move to the moon. My mother grew up being told the CBD was where you went to work and then left as fast as you could. Her own mother cleaned offices on Marshall Street for twenty years and never once stayed after dark.

Looking for a Room in a City I Thought I Knew

I knew every pavement in the inner city, but I knew nothing about living there. I did not know which buildings had been converted properly and which had just had their windows painted. I did not know what a deposit should be or what water and lights would add. I spent two weekends walking around with a notebook, asking security guards and caretakers questions, and mostly getting shrugs.

In the end I did what everybody does now and searched on my phone at midnight. I typed in flats to rent in Johannesburg CBD and sat scrolling through photographs of rooms, which as a photographer is its own strange torture, because I kept noticing the lighting instead of the floor space. One listing had a window that faced east. I zoomed into it until the pixels broke apart. I could tell from the angle of the shadow on the sill that the sun would come straight in at dawn.

The Building With the East Window

I went to see it on a Saturday. The building had been offices once, you could tell from the wide corridors and the old brass numbers on the doors. Someone had turned it into small apartments with polished concrete floors and big steel windows, and there was a woman at the front desk who knew the names of the tenants walking past. That mattered to me more than I expected. When my mother asked, later, whether I would be safe, the first thing I told her was that the woman at the desk had said good morning to every single person who walked in, and they had all said it back.

The flat was small. A bed, a kitchen counter, a shower, a table I now use for scanning negatives. But the window was exactly where I had guessed it would be. I stood there with the agent talking behind me about the lease and I was not listening at all. I was looking down at the street, at a man pushing a trolley stacked with cardboard, and thinking that I could photograph him from up here at six in the morning without ever leaving my room.

I want to be honest that I looked at other places too. A friend sent me a list of places to rent in Johannesburg CBD that she had been keeping for her cousin, and I went to see two of them, one in Braamfontein and one closer to Gandhi Square. They were fine. One was cheaper. But neither of them had that window, and I have learned in my work that you do not argue with a window.

What I Did Not Expect

I moved in with three boxes, a tripod, and a mattress my brother helped me carry up in the lift. The first night I barely slept, because the city does not go quiet, it only changes key. At midnight there was music from somewhere down the block. At two there were sirens, and then nothing, and then a taxi hooting a rhythm I eventually realised was the same rhythm every night, as if the driver was saying hello to someone. At four the delivery trucks came. At five the street sweepers. By six I was at the window with my camera, and I have been at that window almost every morning since.

What surprised me was not the noise. It was how quickly the city stopped being a subject and started being a neighbourhood. The man who sells airtime outside the building now saves me a newspaper. The choir women in maroon wave at me, because one of them recognised herself in a print I hung in a café on Fox Street. I buy my bread from the same Ethiopian bakery every morning and the owner's son is teaching me a word of Amharic a week, which I immediately forget.

The Pictures Changed

My work changed in ways I am still trying to understand. When you live somewhere, you stop photographing it like a tourist. I used to look for the dramatic picture, the crowd, the chaos, the thing that looks good in a magazine. Now I photograph a woman watering a single pot plant on a fire escape every evening at quarter past six. I photograph the same lamp post in fourteen kinds of weather. I photographed the inside of the lift once, empty, at three in the morning, and it is the picture people ask me about most.

Last month a small gallery in Rosebank asked me to put together a show. I called it Before the Shutters Go Up, and every single photograph in it was taken within two hundred metres of my bed. On opening night a man from Durban asked me where I lived, and I told him, and he said he had been reading about Johannesburg CBD apartments and was thinking of moving up for work but was nervous. I did not try to talk him into anything. I just told him about the woman at the desk who says good morning, and the east window, and the taxi that hoots the same rhythm every night.

My Mother Came to Visit

My mother came in September. She stood at my window for a long time without saying anything. Then she pointed at a building across the street and said that was where her mother used to clean, on the fourth floor, and that her mother used to tell her about the view from up there, the only nice thing she ever said about the job.

I had not known that. Ten years of photographing these streets and I had not known that my grandmother had once stood on the other side of the road, looking out of a window not much different from mine, at the same street, in a different light.

My mother stayed for supper. She did not leave before dark. When I walked her down to the taxi at eight, she held my arm and told me the city looked different from up there. I told her it looked different from everywhere, you just had to stay long enough to see it.