Guy Tillim was born and raised in Johannesburg, and began taking pictures in the mid-1980s. Tillim has received numerous awards including the Daimler Chrysler Award for South African photography in 2004, the Leica Oskar Barnack Award in 2005, and the first Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography from the Peabody Museum at Harvard University in 2006. He has participated in international exhibitions such as “Documenta XII” (2007), “Appropriated Landscapes: Contemporary African Photography from The Walther Collection” (2011) and “Avenue Patrice Lumumba” at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris.