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9781805980377 Academic Inspection Copy

Albow Gardens

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Located in the northern suburbs of Cape Town, Albow Gardens is a block of council housing encircled by a nearly two-metre-high iron fence dividing the community within it from the neighbourhood surrounding it. During Apartheid, these pastel-coloured buildings were used as dormitories by Air Force soldiers at Ysterplaat military base, which borders the eastern perimeter of the district. Photographer Alessandro Iovino has documented the inhabitants who became his close community over the period of several years. Alessandro Iovino is an Italian photographer who splits his time between South Africa and Italy. His work has been published widely, including in The New York Times, The Guardian, BBC, Le Monde, M Magazine and Wired, among many others.
As a photographer, I wanted to discover what was outside the country where I was born, and I wanted to escape far from what, in some way, made me feel bad. Taking up a camera to remember what I would experience was a fairly instinctive gesture; I think it was vacations with my mother that led me to discover photography. She never took any photos, and it seemed like such a waste to me not to have anything to show once we got home. Later, I think I stayed close to photography because I never really trusted my own memories. After working in economics, I left for London and enrolled in a photography master's program. It seemed like the most rational and logical choice in such a drastic change of direction, which had very little logic to it, especially in my mother's eyes. But at least I would earn a certificate, and at home, certificates have always been taken very seriously. Since then, I've tried to make this photography thing into a real job, but in the end, it's always been photography that has chosen where to take me. I started by doing stories for newspapers and magazines; it seemed like the closest thing to a real job, my mother's pragmatism was haunting me again; deep down, though, I've always feared that work could ruin what of magical was in photography. In those years, I was lucky to meet other photographers who showed me how this medium could be used to say something different - to question and to understand. I feel that this struggle between work and photography is still ongoing.
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