In Dreaming the Street, David Lurie turns to the street as both subject and state of mind. Made in the inner cities of Cape Town and Johannesburg, this body of work explores the street as a place where lives unfold in fragments, performances and pauses, where identity is constantly rehearsed and reimagined.

Lurie photographs the street not as spectacle or social theatre, but as a space of wakeful dreaming. People appear suspended between inner worlds and public presence: distracted, guarded, expressive, withdrawn. Faces confront the camera directly or drift past it, absorbed in private thoughts or digital conversations. The images hold a tension between clarity and uncertainty, revealing just enough while withholding resolution.

A recurring presence in the work is the cellphone, now inseparable from the contemporary street. It functions as an extension of the body, a conduit to elsewhere, linking the local to a global network of circulation. In Lurie’s photographs, connectivity is both empowering and isolating. The street becomes layered, physical and digital at once, a place where people are present yet partially absent, rooted yet elsewhere.

Signage, graffiti and urban text play an equally vital role. Words and images collide with bodies, histories and commerce, collapsing politics, aspiration and everyday survival into the same visual field. These surfaces speak, fade and fracture over time, turning declarations into texture and protest into pattern. The city writes itself constantly, even as it erases.

Rather than offering conclusions, Dreaming the Street dwells in ambiguity. The photographs resist fixed narratives, asking viewers to sit with uncertainty and contradiction. They are attentive to vulnerability without resorting to spectacle, and to dignity without idealisation. What emerges is a portrait of urban life as unfinished, restless and deeply human.

Dreaming the Street is ultimately a meditation on seeing and believing, on what it means to witness a world where reality is filtered through screens, desire and memory. It presents the street as a living archive of becoming, where dream and dread, intimacy and exposure, coexist in every passing moment.