A4 Arts Foundation
SOUTH AFRICA IN FOCUS
Photo book!
Photo-book!
Photobook!
A browsable exhibition of photobooks from the 1940s to now, tracing South Africa’s history through the art of bookmaking.
“This exhibition presents a large and contradictory archive of photobooks of and about South Africa made between 1945 and 2025. The focus is geographic, but not nationalistic. Books published internationally sit alongside books produced locally. The exhibition presents evidence of a cosmopolitan book culture during the politically charged years of high apartheid years (1948–94), when state repression and censorship ensnared even photobooks. It also includes abundant examples of innovation in photography and book design in the democratic years that followed (1994–present).”
– Sean O’Toole, 2025
First shown at A4 Arts Foundation in 2022, Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook! has continued to be updated and adapted. At KYOTOGRAPHIE 2026, the exhibition will see the launch of curator Sean O'Toole's new book, which explores themes of innovation, risk and resistance in the South African photobook. The book includes an extensive essay on Ernest Cole's House of Bondage (1967) and David Goldblatt's In Boksburg (1982), as well as biographies of nearly 50 important books published since the 1950s.
Installation view (vitrine): Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook! curated by Sean O'Toole, 11 February–21 May 2022. Image © A4 Arts Foundation.
artist アーティスト
A4 Arts Foundation A4 Arts Foundation
A4 emerged out of Cape Town in 2017 as a “laboratory for the arts”. The organisation supports artists and arts workers while offering an open interface for audiences to engage with artistic and curatorial processes as they unfold. Its space in Cape Town brings these elements together:
a public library, adaptable rooms for showing and sharing work, a residency program, a bookshop, and offices for a team dedicated to the daily labour of cultural production. A4 works in the arts because it believes artists and arts workers are uniquely equipped to imagine, experiment, and build new futures that are socially and environmentally just.
Venue 会場
Hachiku-an (Former Kawasaki Residence)
- Address
-
340 Sanjyo-cho Nakagyo-ku, Kyoto
- Access
-
Subway Karasuma or Tozai Lines ""Karasuma Oike"" station, 5 min on foot from Exit 6
Subway Karasuma Line ""Shijo"" station or Hankyu ""Karasuma"" station, 8 min on foot from Exit 22 or 24