South African photographer Mikhael Subotzky and British photographer Patrick Waterhouse have won the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2015 for their portrait of a South African skyscraper.

The 54-floor Ponte City skyscraper is an example of urban decay and attempted regeneration in the heart of Johannesburg. Subotzky and Waterhouse – who met on residency in Italy – decided to photograph, and write about the building and the people living there as microcosm of Joburg.

The building itself, designed by Manfred Hermer in 1975, is almost a representation of how the city has changed since Apartheid – and represents the history of South Africa as a whole.

Subotzky is a South African photographer, born in Cape Town in 1981. He and British photographer Patrick Waterhouse, who was born in the same year in the UK, are a team of ‘photography brothers’ if you wish. While born in different countries, they were drawn together by their love of photography. The history of documentary photography plays a decisive role in Mikhael Subotzky’s work. At an early age, the artist was exposed to the activist work of his uncle, Gideon Mendel, who is one of South Africa’s notable “struggle photographers”. He grew up committed to social democracy and justice.

Both artists’ endeavours attest to photography’s potential to construct, document and engage with meaning in the world today. This is probably why Ponte City was selected with its red Vodacom advert shining like a lighthouse from the top of the circular apartment block. Built in the 70s for white sophisticates under the apartheid regime, its advertising slogan forty years ago was “Welcome to heaven on Earth”. It was once one of the most coveted places to live. During the political transition in the 1980s and 90s, it became a refuge for black newcomers to the city and immigrants from all over Africa. But then neglect resulted in Ponte City being positioned as the prime symbol of urban decay in the city, and became the supposed epicentre of crime, prostitution and drug dealing.

In 2007, new developers bought the building and evicted half the tenants and set about making it an urbane, cosmopolitan showpiece. They went bankrupt after promising to R300 million on their architectural vision. Their aim was to target a new generation of aspirant middle-class residents – young, upwardly mobile black professionals from across the African continent and for those seeking chic Manhattan-style inner city living.

They began their project in 2007 working with the remaining residents, after the regeneration project had failed. Subotzky and Waterhouse have created an intimate and deeply evocative social portrait of a culture, building and its community of residents through photographs, architectural plans, and other archival and historical material. An additional sequence of seventeen booklets containing essays and personal stories complete the visual and spatial narrative of this landmark.

“We were interested in the ups and downs of the building and how it bastardised the concept of modernism and related to the apartheid policies of the time,” said Subotzky. “The false promises of apartheid and false promises of modernist architecture were alive here.”

It features an open core—a requirement needed to meet what was, at the time, a city law requiring windows in bathrooms and kitchens. The apartments were large and luxurious with spectacular views. It was an apartheid-era show-piece for South Africa’s largest city, a bustling urban centre with a shopping mall and plans for an indoor ski slope. However, as whites moved out of downtown and apartheid began to crumble, Hillbrow was among the first neighbourhoods to integrate. By the time apartheid finally fell in 1994, the area had largely been consumed by crime, drugs and decay, and Ponte City became a vertical slum.

Today, its floors are filled with students and middle-class families—including, for the first time in decades, a handful of whites.

“It’s no longer fancy and aspirant, nor is it a dystopic nightmare; it’s just settled back into something normal,” said Subotzky. “Joburg is a very young city, a frontier town where people come from rural areas of the country and all over Africa to make their fortune. There’s a magnetic pull of Joburg, and of the building itself, which would often be their first port of call—like Ellis Island.”

Subotzky methodically photographed the front door of each of the 467 apartments, the views seen from within them, and scenes flickering on their televisions. He also asked those he’d meet in the creaking, straining elevators if he could take their portrait. The resulting images are set against the silver walls of an elevator and illuminated by the fluorescent lights above, are intimate and claustrophobic. His subjects gaze into the lens with a distant stare that borders on suspicion.

“You can see the awkwardness and honesty there because at that point we didn’t know people in the building,” said Subotzky. The question why he didn’t photograph his own apartment in ‘Future Slick’, as Ponte is also affectionately called, may relate to his own privacy.

About the prize

Mikhael and Patrick’s book Ponte City was published by Steidl in 2014 and has now won the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2015. The Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2015 is an annual prize established by London’s The Photographers’ Gallery in 1996 and the Deutsche Börse Group since 2005. The annual award of £30,000 rewards a living photographer, of any nationality, for a specific body of work in an exhibition or publication format that has significantly contributed to photography in Europe between 1 October 2013 and 30 September 2015.

All images copyright Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse courtesy Goodman Gallery