David Lurie’s ‘Morning After Dark’ launches at the University of Stellenbosch Museum in association with Sulger-Buel Lovell.

Morning After Dark is a series of urban landscapes of the formal and informal parts of Cape Town, all of which have been taken in early-morning light, when (mostly) no-one was present.

“The moments I have chosen to isolate, when the protagonists of the photographs are absent,” Lurie explains, “was deliberate and something of a departure for me; while recording what is seen, what is shown invokes what or who is not shown. They are the centre of this narrative. The true subjects of the photographs are, in this sense, invisible, yet contained within the photographs”.

With a background of study, teaching, research and writing in politics, philosophy and economics it is not surprising that his interests are in major issues of our time: urbanisation; social marginalisation; ingenuity; urban sustainability. His focus is on structures (natural and man-made).

His images are distinctive. His portraits display a rare interaction (‘two-way gaze’) between photographer and subject; an often disconcerting transformation of spectacle into spectator, where the viewer (photographer) appears to be under scrutiny. His cityscapes are ‘personal’, with obsessive attention to detail. The fascination and strangeness often lies in the minutiae. His subjects are portrayed unflinchingly and truthfully, yet caringly.

The exhibition will be opened at 6.30 pm on August 5 by Johannesburg-based art writer and theorist, James Sey.

The images form part of an ongoing book project about urbanisation and the marginalised of Cape Town, provisionally entitled The Right to the City, to be published in 2016.

The exhibition runs until October 31.