Everyone keeps talking about the future of Joburg,” photographer Mark Lewis said on a recent phone call, “but if something is not done urgently, there might be no future.”

Born in Klerksdorp, a small town about 160 km outside of Joburg, Lewis moved to the city as a teenager, and has spent the last decade walking his adopted city’s inner-city streets, capturing and cataloguing the rapid changes taking place in one of Africa’s most prominent metropolises, once admiringly known as Egoli—the city of gold.

His vast collection of photographs presents a chronicle of Joburg’s many contradictions. They show the inner city’s decline while simultaneously capturing the many colourful characters who inhabit its neighbourhoods, suggesting that despite the visible infrastructural and other fundamental failures, life—albeit not following any master plan—continues. 

Lewis’ high-contrast photographs expose the many facets of life in a city, which, in the view of many residents, is experiencing what feels like the worst period
of its 138-year history. 

In August 2023, 73 people died in a fire that tore through one of the city centre’s many “hijacked” towers, exposing a failure by city authorities to rein in the growing number of people living under dangerous conditions in derelict, abandoned buildings with no services. Just a few weeks before this tragedy, a gas explosion captured in dramatic footage killed one person and injured about 50 others. Investigations concluded that the disaster, which caused millions of Rands worth of property damage, was the result of an unmonitored gas leak. 

2024 has brought an endless flow of equally troubling developments. At the time of writing, Joburg is experiencing severe water shortages atop the daily hours-long power failures euphemistically referred to as “load shedding”. Having plagued the country for the last few years and with no end in sight, these blackouts epitomise what appears to be an out of control cascade of problems. 

Simply put, Joburg’s infrastructure is failing. Everywhere, the city is crumbling, and no one appears to be holding the reins.

Overseeing Joburg’s decline for decades, the African National Congress (ANC) lost leadership of the city in 2016—the first time since the fall of Apartheid. Johannesburg has had eight mayors in the last five years alone. Regardless of party affiliation, each new mayor—elected via a series of often-chaotic council votes to replace their predecessor in a seemingly endless rotation—has proven incapable of making decisions to change the city’s increasingly worrisome course. 

Although many of the city’s problems have been long in the making, most commentators attribute the scale and extent of decline to this failure of leadership and related institutional collapse. 

“There has always been a sense of excitement upon entering the CBD. Though never quite sure what you would be confronted by, you’d always have this sense that the city was awash with opportunity—that the people’s spirit would prevail and the light at the end of the tunnel still shone brightly. However, my sense now is that the light is flickering. No amount of cleanups will cleanse away what ails the city. Instead, what’s needed is a new political will, not based on party politics but on the people who have chosen to make Joburg their home from wherever they have come,” Lewis says.

The following images are part of Lewis’ ongoing series, Joburg. INsideOUT. Capturing the city centre—once a bustling centre of big business, now predominantly informal—and the new city emerging in acute contrast to that infamous historical centre, they expose ever sharper lines being drawn in an already divided and highly unequal city.