Sean O'Toole

Most famously shot against a ruined wall in Westbury, Johannesburg, Rhode's images cling nostalgically—yet hopelessly—to the particularity of a place in the very moment that longing is cancelled out. Symptoms of exile, screeds for loss, they evoke a sentiment shared by the great Palestinian humanist, Edward Said, for whom 'A part of something is for the foreseeable future going to...

In Boksburg was published in 1982 as one of the earlier photobooks made in South Africa. David Goldblatt, himself from a white background and a critical observer of the dynamics inherent in the racist set-up of his native country, had become interested in capturing the "wholly uneventful flow of commonplace, orderly life" of the white population around him. Boksburg, a...