The Market Photo Workshop in partnership with the Centre on African Public Spaces and the University of Johannesburg extended an invitation to photographers from across the African continent to submit their work in response to a special and juried call around African public spaces. Photographers with a keen interest in public spaces and photography were invited to submit a selection of works that respond to public spaces in communities across Africa. Ten successful applicants took part in a three-month photography mentorship through the Market Photo Workshop.

The project seeks to promote new photography works of social responsibility, activism and ethical investigation by African photographers. It intends to initiate a discussion that highlights the complexity of perceptions of place, space and belonging particularly from an African perspective. There are many different questions and positions about public spaces and diverging views which often remain hidden. In South Africa, issues of space are entangled with its racial and apartheid history and in Africa broadly with legacies of colonisation, conjectures of ownership, belonging and identity. These legacies embedded in spaces continue to reproduce an oppressed and unequal society in both urban and rural contexts.

The Centre on African Public Spaces through The Market Photo Workshop seeks to use photography to unpack and engage dynamics embedded in these spaces to develop a richer understanding of African public spaces.This project presented an opportunity for photographers and those with a keen interest in public spaces to reflect on their significance for community building, their historical value as well directly engaging in the process of developing an African understanding and definition of what makes a public space.