GRAHAM DE LACY - My Toxic Nostalgia

In My Toxic Nostalgia, Graham De Lacy turns his lens toward Johannesburg’s vanishing mine dumps - the monumental earthworks that once defined the skyline and psyche of the “City of Gold.” These images, at once elegiac and radiant, form both a personal reckoning and a social archaeology of place.

De Lacy’s photographs trace a geography of memory. Growing up in Crown Mines, the artist recalls a childhood spent among these ochre mountains, sites of adventure and belonging, that in hindsight were also landscapes of toxicity and extraction. What was once perceived as a playground now reveals itself as a residue of empire: a terrain shaped by industrial greed and ecological consequence.

Shot over a decade beginning in 2013, My Toxic Nostalgia captures the slow unravelling of these artificial topographies. Through a restrained yet poetic lens, De Lacy renders the dumps in soft, particulate light: their surfaces shimmering with the same golden hue that once promised fortune. In doing so, he restores to them a fragile dignity, transforming decay into a meditation on time, inheritance, and the contradictions that underpin Johannesburg’s identity.

These photographs invite us to confront a dual inheritance; beauty and contamination, nostalgia and loss and to reflect on how landscapes carry the weight of both memory and forgetting. In De Lacy’s hands, the mine dump becomes more than a ruin; it is an allegory for South Africa’s modernity, built on the uneasy sediment of history.