“Wake Up, This is Joburg is a fantastic, creative work that offers a broad look at one of Africa’s most vibrant and intriguing cities. By digging down into a range of compelling stories, Mark Lewis and Tanya Zack give their readers a rich and textured entrée into the inventiveness, precarity, and contingency that shape the lived experiences of Johannesburg’s residents. Illuminating parts of the city that readers may know little or nothing about, this book is a beautifully executed, smart, and elegant contribution.” - Danny Hoffman, author of Monrovia Modern: Urban Form and Political Imagination in Liberia
“Johannesburg’s inner city can seem like a malevolent playground with its equipment scattered across broken fields, but it is still a place for life to reinvent itself. Tanya Zack and Mark Lewis give us stories and images of individuals residing in neighborhoods heading in all directions at once, places where everything is up for grabs. As such, these stories are replete with wild mixtures of various feelings and astute intelligence, reminding us how little we know about the cities where we live.” - AbdouMaliq Simone, author of The Surrounds: Urban Life within and beyond Capture
"These pieces are sometimes sad, sometimes inspiring, and add up to a complicated picture of a city of contradictions. . . . Wake Up, This Is Joburg tells its range of interesting stories well, through on-the-ground reporting, with ample interviews and context, letting a variety of people around Johannesburg talk about both the struggles and successes of everyday life in the inner city."
- Jeff Fleischer, Foreword
"Wake Up, This Is Joburg effectively frames Johannesburg as one of the continent’s most important entrepôts where people journey from various nodes of the country and continent to earn a decent living. Rather than criminalise their activities, these stories provoke readers to ‘wake up’ and pay attention to those who make this city a fascinating but enigmatic place to live." - Denise L. Lim, Urban Studies
"There is rich nuance in Tanya Zack’s flowing, sensitive narrative and Mark Lewis’s striking photography. The stories they tell are deeply human and individualised, yet cleverly interwoven within Johannesburg’s broader racial, social and economic anomalies. . . . This is an extraordinary book, with beautiful, powerful photographs and a sensitive, robust and accessible narrative. It provides a fresh perspective on life, struggle, survival, creativity and uniqueness in one of Africa’s major cities." - Chris Heymans, litnet
"As a collection of salient imagery and anecdotes, the book is a poignant refutation of the cultural anger gripping White South African communities, and a visually arresting plea to recognise the city as an important cosmopolitan hub. As South Africa’s metropoles continue to undergo major political change, Wake Up, This Is Joburg is a critical reminder that it is the barriers to integration constructed by the white political class that have created the country’s political woes." - Joe Konieczny, Visual Studies
"The book explores the city's inconsistencies in a nuanced manner with fantastic photographs — emphasising the routines, rhythms and rituals of the people with conflicting worldviews who make the city tick. Surprising aspects of Johannesburg were revealed to me, broadening my own interpretation of the jolly, jaded city." - Celeste Theron, Vrye Weekblad
"Zack and Lewis’s beautiful, unusual, and challenging book condenses many of [Johannesburg's] obstinate contradictions, without judgment, policy prescriptions, or an attempt to aggressively overtheorize Joburg into something unified. Its value is not just in its thoughtful presentation of a complicated city but also in its emphasis on the humanity, if not always the humaneness, of contemporary urban life." - Nicky Falkof, Cultural Politics
"In Wake Up, This is Joburg, image and text lean on one another, lending meaning here and there." - Ruth Simbao, Safundi
