LIVING ON THE EDGE

Johannesburg and other modern Africa cities are places where ‘leftover spaces’ host a range of innovative, small-scale entrepreneurs who, in small and multiple ways, transform the city from within. It is often within the cracks of legality or the spaces left over or abandoned by failed dreamers that the creative, the innovative and the desperate are welcomed into Johannesburg. These portraits of waste pickers, gold diggers and traders show the spaces where people live and work in a so-called informal economy. And in a city which seethes with inequality these are lives that are lived simultaneously on the edge and at the very centre of Johannesburg.