Paul Seawright: Invisible cities / Oublier

In his series Invisible cities (titled after a book by Italo Calvino), Paul Seawright explores the peripheries of African cities, the “murky borderlands” which tend to develop outside of official control and where people must constantly adapt to the environment in order to survive in places of lawlessness.

In his series Oublier (the verb “to forget” in French, even though his website states that the title comes from “Oubliettes”, which were undergroung jails where people were left abandoned in the medieval times), he photographs the attics of public buildings. These pictures symbolise the border between private and public space, past and present, what is remembered and forgotten within collective memory.