There's a quiet irony in artist Stephen Hobbs' photographic exhibition of
inner-city Johannesburg, now hanging at Workshop17 Hyde Park Corner.
When Hyde Park Centre opened its doors in November 1969, it was South Africa's first fully enclosed shopping centre and one of the city's first decentralised retail projects. Commerce, offices and confidence slowly left the CBD for the suburbs, and the city centre Hobbs would later photograph was left behind.
More than fifty years on, Hyde Park Corner is changing too, as its office floors become shared, collaborative workspaces and its walls become a gallery. Neighbouring Facades brings archival images of a city in transition into a building going through its own architectural evolution. The venue, Workshop17, chosen intentionally is built on the foundation of giving buildings a second life, from a tobacco office in Paarl to a post office in Muizenberg, with a gallery intent on sharing space with people, organically where they work everyday.
Driven by an obsession with Johannesburg's architecture and the changing pre-to-post apartheid landscape, Hobbs’ photographic images produced between 1995 and 2009, explore the contradictions and persistent spatial tensions of a city built under colonial and apartheid rule. While several of the photographs denote a social documentary approach looking at states of decay, neglect or abandonment, Hobbs’ core artistic interest was in developing a visual language akin to the optical characteristics of deception, of obfuscation, of camouflage.
Architectural styles
His appointment as curator of the Market Theatre Galleries (1994 to 2000) meant a daily drive and interaction with the city, over the Queen Elizabeth Bridge into Newtown. Witness to the city's many bricked-up and abandoned buildings, numerous violent encounters, notorious inner-city fear and dread, and an evolving streetscape all shaped how he photographed Johannesburg. Driving and walking were central to his curatorial work, while visiting artists in Hillbrow, Berea, Yeoville, Troyeville and Soweto energised the young artist behind the lens and contributed to a gritty orientation and a form of city mapping, full of contradictions.
The architectural styles born from Joburg's gold-mining boom, saw a city positioning itself on a global stage, and its colonial and international style buildings spoke to that ambition. For Hobbs, glass curtain-wall buildings such as the ‘old Johannesburg Sun’ or Helmut Jahn’s ‘diamond building’ near Marshall Town, served as dramatic canvases that took in warped reflections of the surroundings. The tension between the gridded glass panels and the distorted urban subjects slowly give way to entropy at the time of massive political change. Hobbs attributes a notion of strict-wildness to the city. Like camouflage, its metamorphosis was a response to fast-changing socio-economic practices and a reputation for danger. For many, Joburg’s CBD hovered like a mirage on the horizon, enshrouded by danger, it was best avoided at all costs.
For those fascinated by the changing cultural landscape, the city was a rich new resource for storytelling and reinvention.
New forms of expression, rituals and patterns of occupation, ownership and consumption were all emerging. Hobbs, though, was less concerned with documenting people's lived experiences, but rather, he captured the metaphors of in-betweenness, a deliberate choice to read the city through its built form instead of speaking on behalf of the people that use it.
Jozi seen in a different lense.
Below are a few pieces of the exhibition currently on show.
Don't miss Neighbouring Facades, curated by Claudia Bentel of W17 Gallery and on show at Workshop17 Hyde Park Corner until end December 2026. Workshop17 is a collection of beautifully designed, built and serviced workspace solutions across South Africa and in Mauritius.
View Neighbouring Facades at Workshop17 Hyde Park Corner, corner of Jan Smuts Avenue and William Nicol Drive, Hyde Park.
For more information, contact Claudia at [email protected]
References
Gauteng Tourism Authority. The evolution of malls in Gauteng.
Afritraveller (23 Nov 2019). Hyde Park Corner celebrates 50 years of style and quality.
Glamour SA (2019). Hyde Park Corner celebrates 50 fabulous years.
CityLife Arts (21 Jul 2023). Turbine Art Fair and its charming new home Hyde Park Corner beckon.
News24 (1 Jul 2025). Hyprop sells half of Hyde Park Corner for R805m.
Business Day (20 Jan 2026). Failed Hyde Park deal highlights challenges for Hyprop's upscale asset.
