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.

From the publisher:

"Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse worked at Ponte City, the iconic Johannesburg apartment building which is Africa’s tallest residential skyscraper, for more than six years. They photographed the residents and documented the building – every door, the view from every window, the image on every television screen. This remarkable body of images is presented here in counterpoint with an extensive archive of found material and historical documents. The visual story is integrated with a sustained sequence of essays and documentary texts. In the essays, some of South Africa’s leading scholars and writers explore Ponte City’s unique place in Johannesburg and in the imagination of its citizens. What emerges is a complex portrait of a place shaped by contending projections, a single, unavoidable building seen as refuge and monstrosity, dreamland and dystopia, a lightning rod for a society’s hopes and fears, and always a beacon to navigate by."

23 x 36 cm | hardcover, clothbound book in a box | 192 pages

Patrick Waterhouse (b. 1981) works across photography, drawing, slow journalism, graphic design, sculpture and many other disciplines. His practice involves in-depth research, often working in communities and collaborating with other artists, researchers and writers. 

Mikhael Subotzky (b. 1981, Cape Town) is a Johannesburg-based artist whose works in multiple mediums (including film installation, video, photography, collage and painting) critically engage with the instability of images and the politics of representation. Subotzky has exhibited in a number of important international exhibitions, and his work is collected widely by international institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Solomon R Guggenheim Museum (New York), the National Gallery of Art (Washington), Tate (London), Centre Pompidou (Paris), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the South African National Gallery, among others. 

Mikhael Subotzky and Lindokuhle Sobekwa's Tell It to the Mountains opened in A4's gallery in October 2021.