19 January to 1 March 2008

The fastest growing cities in the world today are on the African continent. By 2015 Lagos will be the second largest city in the world, following closely on the heels of Tokyo.

The exhibition title, Invisible Cities, is taken from Italo Calvino’s 1970s book of the same name. The book asserts that a city is less defined by its physicality and more by the way its inhabitants move within; “… something unseen that hums between the cracks”. Combining portraiture and landscape, Paul Seawright’s photographs made in Lagos, Johannesburg, Lusaka and Addis Ababa, focus on those seemingly interminable prosaic moments, glimpses of the everyday in the hidden recesses of the city.

Photographic representation of Africa in a Western context has been a source of fascination for Paul Seawright for several years. Since 2005 he has been returning to areas that, notwithstanding their scale, remain largely hidden from, and visually unrepresented in, the West. The images depict rapidly growing settlements within the fabric of the city; settlements that become urban centres in their own right. These makeshift environments are unplanned and chaotic, often developing in the margins and empty spaces of the city that spawned them. These powerful pictures give voice to this new urbanism that highlights a dramatic, shifting and occasionally troubled landscape apparently invisible to the developed world.

Paul Seawright is Professor of Photography at University of Ulster. He represented Wales at the Venice Biennale in 2003, exhibits regularly internationally and is represented by the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin.

A Ffotogallery, Cardiff exhibition, courtesy of the artist.
The organisers gratefully acknowledge the loan of works from the Arts Council of Ireland, Queen’s University, Belfast and Sies & Hoeke, Düsseldorf