A solitary figure pulling his cart in Johannesburg is reminiscent of a prospector with a small load of precious metals. In a curious way, this image reflects one attribute of photography – to stretch past and present. The arc of the gold-bearing reef below that gave rise to the city is echoed by another prospector, a century later, who will hawk his load by weight to scrap-metal dealers in the city. In this photograph, the building that terminates the street is Johannesburg Central Police Station, and from this vantage point, the building seemingly blocks the path of the road. This is unusual for Johannesburg, since its grid layout created views down its roads that extended as far as the eye could see. As a metaphor, the building terminates the road, giving the appearance of a dead-end that resonates with the building's history. Our view is blocked and our mobility is curtailed by the building which was itself the end point for many under apartheid.

The building faces Commissioner Street, a central artery that cuts through the old financial district and connects to Main Reef Road at each end. It is arguably the oldest road in Johannesburg. Immediately to the west of the building lies De Villiers Graaff motorway, constructed in 1972, which skirts the city, forming a boundary between city and veld, and city and mining land. Commissioner Street marks the southernmost line of the uitvalgrond – a small triangle of surplus ground on which the city arose. On this line, two dominant landscape forces that shaped the city rub against each other: the grid of the cityscape, and the mine dumps deposited over a century ago. Commissioner Street marks the invisible line of the gold-bearing reef beneath and a boundary that cuts the city in half, separating Soweto in the south from the wealthier, historically white, land to the north. On this juncture still stands one of the most notorious buildings of apartheid, the Johannesburg Central Police Station, which was previously named John Vorster Square.

One of the characteristic features of a metropolis, as the philosopher Achille Mbembe and literary and cultural theorist Sarah Nuttall note in ‘Writing the World from an African Metropolis’, is an underneath. They write that ‘beneath the visible landscape and the surface of the metropolis, its objects and social relations are concealed or embedded in other orders of visibility’.