A DISTINCTIVE DEPTH OF FIELD

Mark Lewis ghosts through the streets of inner-city Joburg with his camera, often catching people off guard, between heartbeats, between coughing and choking, between laughing hard and falling down

Photographer Mark Lewis has an eye that is unbeatably intense. At the same time he can also be light and ironic, sketching out a grudging half-smile.

As a photographer he is aesthetically agile and acute, but it is the years of uncompromising work, doing his time, that give his work depth. Seldom seeking the limelight, he has covered ground from high-tone fashion in Vogue to inner-city brutalism.

But it is his considered and easy acceptance of any world he finds himself in that makes people open to him.

“The series Wake Up, This Is Joburg was inspired by William Dalrymple’s, book Nine Lives,” he says.

As with Dalrymple, travel often plants the seed for Lewis. “Travel has absolutely played a big part, but due to circumstances over the past six years I have had to cut back and this has forced me to look at my own environment with a fresh eye. Tanya Zack reintroduced me to Joburg, where she has walked the streets as an urban planner. She has shown me how the city works and flows.”

Lewis could turn up anywhere, always fitting in like a local. Here he is riding a bike between Charlotte and Berwick streets in Soho, London. In his beanie, carrying an old leather bag; his face as concentrated as a monk’s. Here he is standing on a bleak hillside in Welkom, beside the graveside of a boy killed on the border. Here he is in Paris, cycling through an underpass, eating garlic sausage, his eye triggered by fissures in a building, quirky textures — always