I am one of those cowards that cannot stand to see images of polar bears stranded mid ocean on melting ice bergs. The sight of pine forests displacing our indigenous veldt makes me feel angry, depressed and fills me with hopelessness.

In the city I find myself drawn to construction sites where I can peer beneath the concrete, tar and brick scabs of our ceaseless building activities to the earth as it was before.

Even more intriguing to me are the open, wild, uncultivated places in Johannesburg that have somehow escaped being built upon. Places such as the very tops of the many ridges that bisect the city and stick out above the lawns, roads and tin roofs. Places of rock, veldt, human shit and shards of glass that give us glimpses of how the land might have looked before the city was founded a little over 100 years ago.

If you look carefully you can see the old landscape of Joburg beneath all that has been heaped upon it over the past century. You can see the geography of the land, the ridges, streams and valleys. It is my intention in this series of images to pay attention to that landscape and what we have done to it. What we continue to do to it. Not in a spirit of negative judgment but as a homage to the land hidden beneath us and in the hope that we can learn to be more gentle.