Peter Bialobrzeski’s latest project, Informal Arrangements, features the interiors of South African shantytown shacks. The photos were taken in 2009 in Kliptown, a suburb of Soweto. It was here, in 1955, that members of the Freedom Charter, the anti-apartheid movement, agreed upon a ten-point program. While the program remained illegal until 1990, it is today an integral part of the South African constitution. Despite the historical mandate, the lives of the inhabitants of these informal settlements have hardly improved in the last fifty years. The linear distance between Kliptown and Soccer City, Johannesburg’s new soccer stadium built especially for the 2010 FIFA World Cup, is less than ten miles. On the international market, admission to just one game is more expensive than all of the furnishings in one of the shacks in Bialobrzeski’s pictures. These photographs speak of the desire to arrange one’s home comfortably using the few means available.
