Dams contains 27 portraits of the country’s dams that Kyle Morland has been photographing since 2011. With a list of 234 dams, their year of construction, water capacity, and GPS coordinates, Morland road trips through South Africa (and neighbours like Lesotho) to find these sites. The journeys must be meticulously planned to best circumvent the many obstacles that will arise en route to visiting dams closely guarded or wholly abandoned, with infrastructure maintained or derelict, via roads marked for traffic or along restricted tracks. Dams shore up water as time with which to bargain for seasons and settlements. As a project, Dams evidences time as a central coordinate where the trapping and tracking of water on a monumental scale meets the action of taking a mechanical photograph. For Morland, “Limited time is also good, you get there and take the photograph and leave: limited time gets you to do what you need to do.”

Dams by Kyle Morland is the first in a series of ten artist zines from Proto printed in a limited edition of 50.