Fourthwall Books
Publishers in Johannesburg

Fourthwall Books hope to raise the bar for art publishing in South Africa by combining innovative and intelligent book design with excellent writing.

We’re still pursuing that goal, though perhaps with a little more clarity than before and also having learned a few important things about books along the way. In 2015 Oliver moved on to new things in Amsterdam, Carla Saunders came on board as our designer and artist and writer Terry Kurgan joined Fourthwall Books as a co-director and editor. Our books are available to purchase from our office and right here on our website, but also from independent bookstores Clarke’s Bookshop in Cape Town, and Love Books, David Krut Bookstores (at both Maboneng and Rosebank outlets) and Bridge books in Johannesburg. If your local bookstore does not yet stock us, get on their case! Hââbré, The Last Generation is a series of portraits of people who represent perhaps the last generation to bear the ritual scarification associated with a number of ethnic groups in various parts of West Africa. These lush images, shot in Choumali’s studio in Abidjan, are accompanied by excerpts of interviews conducted by Choumali with her sitters, which reveal a range of responses to scarification, from pride to ambivalence and even outright rejection of the facial markings. These portraits and texts examine the complex role of tradition in an urban setting such as Abidjan and suggest the shifting nature of the concepts of beauty and identity. Hanging on a Wire: Photographs by Sophia Klaase, in 1999, Rick Rohde, a Research Fellow of the Centre of African Studies at the University of Edinburgh, joined a long-term research project in the village of Paulshoek in Namaqualand, the aim of which was to understand and record the socio-economic and environmental history of the area. Some residents of Paulshoek were invited to contribute to the project through a photographic documentation of the life of the village. One of these photographers was Sophia Klaase, whose images are the cornerstone of this richly layered study of Paulshoek and its environs.