Scientists have sometimes suggested that memories are stored like JPEGs. They are broken up and saved in pieces, which are only put back together when they are called up. The missing data is filled in by the brain. Kurt Tong took his pictures in a botanical garden, in a large format and under ever-changing lighting conditions. He applied different techniques to destroy the information in the image, after which he scanned the images with scanners at different settings. Ultimately he assembled an image again from the results, in the same way that the memory makes a complete image again from fragments.

New shopping malls are shooting up in the suburbs of Johannesburg like mushrooms. Large tracts of nature have to give way for constructions of concrete and steel. These offer residents of the neighbourhood access to a choice selection of consumer goods. At the same time they are deprived of their access to their familiar natural surroundings. Of necessity social life now plays itself out against the background of the malls, with their neon lights, Muzak and glittering advertising signs. Graeme Williams (b. 1941) photographed in them off the cuff, in order to reflect the capricious and unnatural character of these modern shopping malls, exemplars of progress.