„In the street“

Juhan Kuus was a photographer who in many senses lived in the street. A large part of his photographic legacy originates from cities, towns and villages of South Africa, depicting tensions and conflicts, which he witnessed during the apartheid regime, as well as different aspects of the human being. Being a socially sensitive documentary photographer, Juhan Kuus often recorded people and situations to reflect soft spots of society, which many of us would, perhaps, rather leave unnoticed. This pop-up exhibition features a representative selection of what the author saw and experienced in the streets of South Africa.

One of the main messages of Ubuntu, a humanistic spiritual philosophy and ethical concept of South African indigenous people, is that a person is a person through other people: I am who I am because of what we all are. Everybody reflects me and who I am. Therefore, we are all interconnected. According to Ubuntu, we are all one, and everything depicted in those pictures relates to each one of us. Ubuntu supports an approach where the humaneness of each individual increases when he or she helps increase the dignity of others, and decreases when he or she dehumanises others.

Does a failure to notice people in a situation mean that we are dehumanising the individuals involved? Whether and how documentary photography can teach us something about our own humanity?