Daleside, in Gauteng, lies southeast of Johannesburg, a small Afrikaner suburb isolated among industrial outskirts. Once predominantly white, it now holds a dwindling population of mine workers and smallholders, increasingly turned inward. Two photographers entered this setting: the French photographer Cyprien Clément-Delmas and the South African photographer Lindokuhle Sobekwa, who met through the Of Soul and Joy programme launched by Rubis Mécénat in Thokoza, and became friends. Their collaboration, begun in 2015, produced a portrait of the place that deliberately works against the entrenched Black/white binary.

The two bodies of work remain distinct and are meant to be read that way. Clément-Delmas photographs dignified figures whose aspirations sit awkwardly against their circumstances; Sobekwa, who arrived expecting something else, encountered Black and white residents living in the same poverty, out of sight of the guarded houses of the wealthy. His landscape portraits refuse the escapism the other images might imply. Poverty here is not racialised but shared by people treated as forgotten, stuck at a dead end.

GOST Books published the project in 2020 as a Swiss-bound hardback containing two books of 64 pages each. The images by each photographer are presented alongside each other in a foldout book, so they can be read separately or as pairs. This organisation is not decorative; it holds two positions in tension rather than resolving them. The result is a photobook about looking, and about what a collaboration can show that a single vantage point cannot.

It is a considered object from a publisher known for attending to sequence and form, and a document of a place most viewers will never see, made by photographers who chose to look past the expected divide.