Guy Tillim

Guy Tillim (born 1962) is a South African photographer known for his work focusing on troubled regions of Sub-Saharan Africa. A member of the country's white minority, Tillim was born in Johannesburg in 1962.

The website African Success has described him as one of South Africa's "foremost photographers", whilst the Daily Maverick site has referred to him as "arguably SA's finest photographer" after David Goldblatt.

Early career Tillim first became professionally involved in photography as a photojournalist in 1986. The photojournalists of the era, many of whom also worked with the Afrapix collective, were photographing often violent scenes of riots, war, and poverty on the black citizens of South Africa. Many of his most significant bodies of work carry this theme, such as Johannesburg (May, 2005) and Jo'burg Downtown, which include photographs of scenes and dwellers of the city. He stated that he "had always wanted to return and try to find it, try to describe it in some way." In 2014, he participated in a collaborative exhibit at the Museum für Moderne Kunst entitled The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Hell, Purgatory revisited by Contemporary African Artists. Edit Beijing. Paris: Bessard, 2017. Photographs of people on the streets of Beijing made over a two-week period. Edition of 500 copies.

Awards 2002: Prix SCAM (Societe Civile des Auteurs Multimedia) Roger Pic. 2003: Higashikawa Overseas Photographer Award, Japan. 2004: Daimler-Chrysler Award for South African photography. 2005: Leica Oskar Barnack Award for his Jo'burg series. Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. 2006: São Paulo Art Biennial 2007: Included in FotoGrafia, Rome's International Festival in the group exhibition Non Tutte Le Strade Portano a Roma, Ex Gil 2007: Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg 2007: Congo Democratic, Extraspazio, Rome 2007: Africa Remix, Johannesburg Art Gallery 2007: Photography, Video, Mixed Media III, DaimlerChrysler Gallery, Berlin 2012: Second Nature, Huis Marseille Museum for Photography, Amsterdam 2014: The Divine Comedy. Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists, curated by Simon Njami