City In Transition is an exhibition of photographs by the artist Andrew Tshabangu that was exhibited from 14 June - 07 July 2007.

The exhibition is seen by the photographer through the haze of traffic fumes and brazier fires, through the starred glass of shattered windows. It is a city shuffling, lurching, hastening and bargaining its way towards an uneasy truce with the twenty-first century.

Tshabangu is a documentarian in the classical sense, a recorder of minutiae - he sees the face of an old man come into focus through the fist-sized hole in a factory window - and an observer of grand-scale shifts in historical, economic and political paradigms. His image of crowds flowing like water around a concrete pillar emblazoned with the logo of a major bank is at once mundane - these are ordinary people simply rushing for taxis and trains - and epic. Here is a city in which crowds engulf or are carried forward by the monetary power suggested by that logo. Tshabangu achieves this tension - between the story of the everyday and the master narrative - by constantly shifting his perspective, but always maintaining a philosophical and literal distance from his subjects. He does the former by alternating between long shots and extreme close-ups, shooting into the distance in some images and snapping what is close at hand in others; and by making plain the juxtaposition of foreground and background, he is constantly making reference to his own position in the moment of the photograph. In one image, a nod to his elder, Santu Mofokeng, he looks past the sideview mirror of a car to take in a street vendor in the middle ground and the crowded skyline of concrete and billboards in the distance. What gives pause in this image is the reflected image of a towering apartment block in the mirror giving way to a barren lot littered with rocks, dustbins and, most unlikely of all, chickens.

In order to allude to something larger than the faces in the crowds on the street, Tshabangu often shoots through veils of smoke and glass, or from a slightly elevated position. This has the effect of constructing something around the subjects that his camera takes in, of adding a kind of thinking and filtering process to mere observation. In other words, Tshabangu's experience of the city is, as his images and style suggest, multi-layered. On the one hand, his black and white photographs record his contact with small-time vendors, harried taxi operators and cleaning women shuttling their brooms from street to street: he is indeed a commuter like any other. But on the other hand, the impact of his body of work resides in its presentation of the city as a symbol of something larger than the daily rush and grind of people. His perception is of a city almost cinematic in its pace and movement, reminiscent of Eisenstein or Chaplin but more fragmented, less constructed. Tshabangu's Johannesburg is not a beautiful or romantic city. It is aggressive and gritty, uneasily shouldering its burden of exploding wealth and mass immigration, constantly changing its shape, and never - not for a single moment - at rest.