A white South African, Tillim is the first winner of the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography. Gardner, who funded the prize, is best known for his documentary "Dead Birds." A legendary figure in the field, he taught film at Harvard for many years.
"Avenue Patrice Lumumba: Photographs by Guy Tillim" is a product of the fellowship. It's at Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology through Sept. 7. The photographer has described it as "a walk through avenues of dreams."
Naming streets after Patrice Lumumba is a common practice in southern Africa. Lumumba, the first elected prime minister of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, was murdered in 1961, only months after taking office. So he is that most alluring of historical types: the idealist who died before his ideals could be tested and, perhaps, found wanting. Thus the streets named for him very much are, as Tillim suggests, avenues of dreams: a dream of a continent freed from outside rule and left to flourish in freedom and prosperity.
The reality proved far different, which makes the dreamlike quality of Tillim's pictures all the more striking. There are 21 of them, taken in Mozambique, Madagascar, Congo, Angola, Ghana. Each is big, roughly 2 1/2 feet by 4 feet, and in color.
The color is so delicate as to seem almost faded - a function of the thin, watery light that fills many of Tillim's photographs. That's one contributor of dreaminess. Another is the parade of incongruity they record: a chair with torn armrests, headless statues, a sheet flapping on a clothesline in a drained swimming pool. Through a trick of perspective, a plaque shaped in an outline of the African continent looks like an oddly formed stain or bit of missing plaster.
Finally, there's the relative absence of people. A few times we glimpse a pedestrian on an otherwise-abandoned street, or a civil servant becalmed at his desk. But "Avenue Patrice Lumumba" is about space and the structures erected (and slowly collapsing) within it, not the people who use them.
The sense of depopulation makes sense. Given the chance, who wouldn't flee such scenes of unemphatic oppressiveness? The modifier is as important as the noun, though. Tillim reveals scraggliness, disrepair, and decay, but no horror. His pictures exhibit a gentleness that's at once generous-spirited and beguiling. He is a fellow African, after all, and there's nothing judgmental about his photographs. When Tillim speaks of "my embrace" of "this strange and beautiful hybrid landscape," one doubts neither the genuineness of his feeling nor the accuracy of his words.
That embrace would be better served were the photographs hung with more formality. They lack both mattes and frames. Perhaps the idea was to give the images an air of casualness and sense of greater immediacy. The effect, though, is of a disregard for upkeep and detail comparable to that evident in so many of the scenes Tillim has photographed.
Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.
