Unequal Scenes
Unequal Scenes uses aerial photography to make inequality visible.
From above, what can feel normal from the ground becomes harder to ignore: neighborhoods divided by highways, walls, rivers and rail lines; informal settlements pressed up against wealthy households; entire communities excluded. What interests me is not only contrast, but repetition. Again and again, across very different places, the same shapes appear. The same separations. It’s the very scale and unerring regularity across geographic regions which points to the systemic nature of inequality.
By using drones and helicopters for this project, I wanted to peek over the walls in my city and enter forbidden liminal territory. I wanted to see exactly what these empty places looked like. What I found, unsurprisingly, was that these landscapes are not accidental. They are designed, reinforced and maintained. It was hard to look straight down on those divisions without the unsettling realization that I, and we, the people gazing at these scenes, are implicated in the systems that produce them. Unequal Scenes is about making visible the structures we have learned to live inside, and showing that what looks natural in the city is often anything but.
Johnny Miller
Johnny Miller is a photographer, filmmaker, artist and drone journalist based in South Africa and the USA. His work moves between photography, urbanism, inequality, health and the built environment, using visual tools to make large structural forces legible.
His work has been published and exhibited internationally, including in National Geographic and the cover of Time, at Photo Art Basel, Unseen and numerous solo shows. Johnny is a Senior Fellow at Code for Africa, an Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity at the London School of Economics, a BMW Responsible Leader and a UN-Habitat Champion. He is represented by Buchkunst Berlin.
Johnny is also the co-founder of africanDRONE, a pan-African initiative focused on using drones for public-interest storytelling, mapping, and analysis, and the director of Millefoto, his wider studio for photography, film, and visual storytelling.
He can be reached at johnny@unequalscenes.com.
Photo: Felipe Meireles
