Rows of informal homes on one side of a road, tree-lined suburban plots on the other, in a scene from Johnny Miller’s Unequal Scenes series. Photo: Johnny Miller / Unequal Scenes.
What Unequal Scenes shows
Unequal Scenes is a long-running aerial photography project by Cape Town-based photographer Johnny Miller. Flying a drone straight above the edges of neighbourhoods, he photographs places where wealth and poverty sit side by side, often separated by nothing more than a road, a fence or a strip of wetland. Seen from the ground, those boundaries blend into the landscape. Seen from a few hundred metres up, they become impossible to miss.
The project began in 2016 in South Africa, the country with some of the highest measured income inequality in the world. Miller posted a single drone image of the Masiphumelele township and its neighbour on Facebook; although he had only about 1,244 followers at the time, it was shared more than 1,000 times, PetaPixel reported. He went on to shoot many more locations around Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban, using a DJI Inspire 1 drone.
Miller’s argument is that the view from above makes visible something that ground-level life hides. As he put it, “Discrepancies in how people live are sometimes hard to see from the ground.” The photographs below come from the first South African part of the series, with notes on what each one shows.
Miller’s short film of the project, combining drone footage from several of the South African locations.
The photographs, one by one
A planned suburb on the left and a township on the right are kept apart by a green corridor and a canal. In the middle sit rows of identical small units that appear to be emergency or temporary housing, the kind councils use while families wait for permanent homes. The geometry is tidy, but the plots on either side are very different in size. Photo: Johnny Miller.
A sprawl of tin-roofed shacks presses right up to a road; across it, houses sit on generous plots shaded by trees and dotted with swimming pools. This contrast between an informal settlement and a leafy suburb is the signature image type of the series. It is believed to show the Kya Sands settlement and Bloubosrand on the northern edge of Johannesburg, one of the locations named in early coverage of the project. Photo: Johnny Miller.
The picture that started it all. On the left is Masiphumelele, a township near Noordhoek on the Cape Peninsula whose Xhosa name means “let us succeed”; it grew from a few hundred residents in the 1980s to an estimated 38,000 by 2010. On the right is the gated Lake Michelle estate. Between them lies roughly 200 metres of wetland. In 2011 a single night fire in Masiphumelele destroyed about 1,500 homes and displaced some 5,000 people. Photo: Johnny Miller.
A manicured fairway and green on one side, packed informal homes on the other. This is the edge of the Papwa Sewgolum municipal golf course in Reservoir Hills, Durban. It is named after Sewsunker “Papwa” Sewgolum, an Indian South African golfer who won the Dutch Open three times; when he won the 1965 Natal Open he was handed the trophy outside in the rain because non-white people were barred from the clubhouse. Photo: Johnny Miller.
An informal settlement on the left faces a newer grid of small government-built houses on the right, with a stream and scrubland running between them. Here the contrast is not rich versus poor so much as unplanned versus planned: both sides are working-class areas, but one has roads, plots and services and the other mostly does not. Photo: Johnny Miller.
Large wooded properties on the left meet densely built homes climbing the slope on the right. The scene resembles Hout Bay near Cape Town, where the township of Imizamo Yethu sits on a hillside above wealthy homes, one of the pairs Miller is reported to have photographed. Tree cover alone tells part of the story: shade and greenery are much rarer in poorer neighbourhoods. Photo: Johnny Miller.
Here the dividing lines are infrastructure: a main road and a railway line. Formal houses on small plots fill the left of the frame, while an informal settlement is squeezed into the strip beside the tracks. Under apartheid, roads, railways and industrial land were often used deliberately as buffers between areas assigned to different racial groups. Photo: Johnny Miller.
A dense settlement on the left, then an empty band of open land, then a regular grid of small houses. The empty strip is a recurring feature in Miller’s pictures: land that separates communities but belongs to neither, often unusable because it is a floodplain, a servitude or simply undeveloped. Photo: Johnny Miller.
Neat suburban houses, a green canal corridor and then long rows of identical units, apparently temporary housing. Photographed straight down, the scene almost looks like a diagram of a city plan, which is exactly the effect Miller wanted: it makes the design of separation visible. Photo: Johnny Miller.
Pulled back to a wider angle, the same kind of boundary looks even more stark: a compact informal settlement on rising ground behind a band of open land, with a suburb of detached houses and gardens in the foreground. The wide view shows how close the two communities are, close enough that people on one side often work in homes or businesses on the other. Photo: Johnny Miller.
Why these borders exist
Many of the boundaries in these photos are not accidents. Under apartheid, the Group Areas Act of 1950 let the government designate areas for exclusive occupation by one racial group, and made it a criminal offence to remain in an area assigned to another group. Whole communities, such as Sophiatown in Johannesburg from 1955, were forcibly removed and relocated. Planners routinely placed townships far from city centres and separated them from white suburbs with highways, railways, rivers or open land.
The Act was repealed on 30 June 1991. But physical cities change slowly, and property, jobs and services followed the old map. Miller notes that some of the communities he photographed were planned to be kept apart, while others grew up informally as settlements formed on whatever land was available near work. In his words, “many of these barriers, and the inequalities they have engendered, still exist.”
It is worth being careful not to read every image as a simple story of villains and victims. Some of the formal areas pictured are themselves modest; some informal settlements have grown since 1994 as people moved to cities looking for work. The history of each place is specific, and the photographs work best as a starting point for that history rather than a substitute for it.
What an aerial photo can and cannot tell you
The drone view is powerful because it removes distractions. Roofs, roads and plot sizes become data: you can see density, tree cover, the presence or absence of a street grid, the width of a buffer. Urban researchers use satellite imagery in the same way to map informal settlements.
But height also hides people. From several hundred metres up you cannot see how residents use the space, the businesses inside the shacks, the community organisations, or the commute that links the two sides. Critics of “poverty from above” imagery also point out that the people photographed rarely choose to be in the picture. Miller has added video to the project, and pairing the images with local reporting and residents’ own accounts gives a fuller picture.
A good way to look at these images is to ask three questions: what separates the two sides, who decided where that line went, and what would it take to cross it every day?
The project beyond South Africa
Unequal Scenes did not stay in South Africa. Miller’s website now lists work from dozens of places, including Mumbai, Manila, Nairobi, Lagos, São Paulo, Mexico, Bogotá, Jakarta, Dubai, Dublin and several US cities such as Detroit, Baltimore, New Orleans, Minneapolis and San Francisco. The point he makes with that list is that the patterns are not unique to one country: highways, gated estates and informal housing produce the same visual lines on several continents.
For anyone interested in cities, the series is a useful reminder that urban design is never neutral. Where a road goes, where a fence is built and which land is left empty all shape who meets whom, and who gets shade, space and safety.
Sources: Unequal Scenes by Johnny Miller; PetaPixel, 20 June 2016; Wikipedia: Group Areas Act; Wikipedia: Masiphumelele; Wikipedia: Papwa Sewgolum; story first shared via True Activist. All photographs by Johnny Miller / Unequal Scenes.
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