GUY TILLIM has worked as a photojournalist since the late 1980s when he first

documented the demise of Apartheid in his native South Africa. He has

received numerous awards for his work, including the DaimlerChrysler Award

for South African photography and the Leica Oskar Barnack Award in 2005.

Most recently he was awarded the first Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography from Harvard University. His books include Congo Democratic, Leopold and Mobuto, and Joburg. He lives in Cape Town, South Africa.

Guy Tillim s earlier photographs documented war-torn Africa and the people whose lives have been shaped by years of conflict and hardship. In this book he focuses on the structures that dot the urban landscape of these troubled countries. The eighty images in this book from Angola, Mozambique,

Madagascar, and the Democratic Republic of Congo reveal modern buildings constructed with illusions of prosperity and peace and then left to decay. This collection reflects the intuitive brilliance that is Guy Tillim s hallmark, tells Africa s story of failure and atrophy, and points to the intersection of

present-day Africa with its colonial past in countries that were forsaken in the name of progress and the perpetual quest for power.