Since 2015, French photographer Cyprien Clément-Delmas and South African photographer Lindokuhle Sobekwa have collaborated to create a portrait of Daleside, a small Afrikaner suburb south-east of Johannesburg, South Africa.

Daleside, in the Gauteng Province, once had a predominantly white population and is isolated in the industrial outer suburbs of Johannesburg. Its separation has resulted in Daleside’s residents becoming increasingly inward-facing, and in the space of a decade it has become an isolated ghost town with a dwindling population consisting of mostly mine workers and smallholders.

The two photographers met through the Of Soul and Joy programme launched by Rubis Mécénat in Thokoza, a township in the suburbs of Johannesburg where Sobekwa grew up, only five kilometres from Daleside. Clément-Delmas and Sobekwa accompanied each other to Daleside where they soon stood out and became recognisable on the streets as it was uncommon to see a Black and white man walking side by side. They struggled, especially at the start of the project, to gain access to personal spaces but gradually and patiently built relationships with their subjects. When Sobekwa returned to Daleside alone he came up with strategies to help build trust such as attending church or carrying round an album of the photographs he was making to show he meant no harm. It took Sobekwa a lot of time and energy to build the trust, which had been much easier when he was with his white French collaborator.

The resulting photographs provide a counterpoint—Clément-Delmas’s images show dignified figures whose dreams are at odds with reality whereas Sobekwa’s landscape portraits show no such escapism. Looking beyond the deep-seated Black/white binary, they depict the poverty afflicting Black and white residents alike as forgotten members of society stuck in a dead end. Contrary to his expectations of what he might find there, Sobekwa came face to face with the reality of Black and white residents experiencing the same poverty out of eyeshot of the tightly-guarded houses of the wealthy. In Dalesidethe images by each photographer are presented alongside each other in a foldout book so they can be read individually or as pairs.

‘I first visited Daleside when my mother was employed there as a domestic worker. At the time, the white-dominated area seemed like an isolated place, a ghost town. It is a place I have always had unresolved issues with and a curiosity about since I that first visit. While growing up, the community was a place I always felt took so much from me—mainly my mother—who had to live there for her line of work. When I was a young boy and went to visit her, I was denied entrance at what to me felt like some kind of paradise. Going back there to photograph was a way for me to confront these feelings, and in doing so, I realized it was not what I expected it to be’. – Lindokuhle Sobekwa

‘The families that stay in Daleside are mostly the ones who can’t afford to go anywhere else. They can’t escape from this place. I believe the people of Daleside dream of a better, different life. But, their reality wakes them up all the time. They are static dreamers, stuck in this town, in their lives and in their social class’.  – Cyprien Clément-Delmas

The Of Soul and Joy programme is a lasting social and artistic initiative undertaken by Rubis Mécénat in 2012 in Thokoza, South Africa, that aims to empower youth in South African townships through photography. The project was commissioned by and the book is in collaboration with Rubis Mécénat.

An exhibition of this project, curated by Valérie Fougeirol will be on display at PhotoSaintGermain festival in Paris, France, from 7 – 23 January 2021.