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Miami as Lens and Threshold
Strydom's poetic and personal visual reflections on the city made of contractions“I still remember that first visit with my dad, the heat, the colours, the buzz of Ocean Drive. The pastel facades of South Beach and the pulse of the streets felt cinematic, like stepping into a living photograph. When I returned decades later to shoot this series, the nostalgia mixed with something new. Miami felt alive to me all over again—its energy, its contradictions, its beauty and imperfection. It became the perfect entry point for Ain’t That America.”
South African lens-based artist Clint Strydom premieres his ambitious new photographic series Ain’t That America at SCOPE Miami on 2 December. The series is the culmination of an ongoing journey across the United States, spanning cities such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Miami, and expanding further in 2026. It serves as a deep interrogation of the myths and contradictions that shape American identity. As Strydom describes, the title operates “both as an exclamation and a question,” prompting viewers to reconsider “what the nation’s image reveals, conceals, and performs.”
For Strydom, Miami was the natural entry point for this project, a city that carries significant personal meaning. “I still remember that first visit with my dad—the heat, the colours, the buzz of Ocean Drive,” he recalls. “The pastel facades of South Beach felt cinematic, like stepping into a living photograph. When I returned decades later to shoot this series… Miami felt alive to me all over again. Its energy, its contradictions, its beauty and imperfection—it became the perfect entry point for Ain’t That America.” This blend of glamour and grit, spectacle and quiet intensity, echoes the dualities he explores throughout the series.
Strydom’s sensitivity to atmosphere, rhythm, and the emotional architecture of place is rooted in his biography. Born in Johannesburg and raised on the KwaZulu-Natal South Coast, he grew up between the slow rhythms of coastal life and the charged dynamism of the city—an early contrast that continues to shape his visual language. His acclaimed series Big City Life and Hidden Shadows & Silent Voices reveal this tension clearly, oscillating between layered urban compositions and distilled meditations on light, memory, and form. Across his practice, Strydom’s instinct is to capture not only what a place looks like, but how it feels: “I’m always trying to photograph the undercurrent,” he explains. “The energy, the atmosphere, the silence between moments.”
This dual visual language—“restless layering and contemplative stillness”—is central to Ain’t That America. In one mode, Strydom’s multi-layered compositions echo the frenetic pulse of modern cities, capturing simultaneity, spectacle, and the choreography of everyday life. In the other, his pared-back still lifes distill light, colour, and geometry into minimal, resonant compositions. These quieter works elevate overlooked elements—diners, neon signage, torn posters, empty chairs—into what Strydom calls “quiet icons” of classic Americana, revealing a nation that is “dissonant yet resonant, ordinary yet mythic, fragmented yet whole.”
Five works created in Miami will make their international debut at SCOPE Miami. Collectively, they function as an exploration of the city’s inherent contradictions—its glamour and decay, its freedom and its constraints. Do Not (Miami, 2025) juxtaposes controlled signage with civic expression, establishing a visual dialogue between regulation and resistance. Mid Beach Vibes (Miami, 2025) layers two distinct urban moments—a cycling group along the waterfront and fluorescent road markings—to reveal “a map of invisible systems pulsing beneath the city’s sunlit calm.” Meanwhile, Sun Loungers, We Moved, and Red Umbrella showcase Strydom’s more contemplative mode, transforming beach chairs, torn posters, and a single umbrella into meditations on stillness, memory, and the subtle textures of belonging.
Across the series, Strydom is less concerned with presenting America as it is, and more with interpreting how it feels—its atmospheric contradictions, its tensions between order and chaos, and the layered emotional architecture of its cities. As he notes, “America exists as much in its silences as in its noise.” In Ain’t That America, Miami becomes both mirror and threshold: a city whose heat, colour, contradictions, and emotional pulse set the tone for a project that will continue to unfold across the United States in 2026.
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Do Not (Miami) 2025
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Mid Beach Vibes (Miami, 2025)
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In Sun Loungers (Miami, 2025),
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Red Umbrella (Miami, 2025)
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We Moved (Miami 2025)
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As one of several cities shaping Ain’t That America, the Miami works illuminate a crucial strand of the series, one defined by heat, contradiction, rhythm, and quiet reflection. Through their balance of layered intensity and distilled stillness, these images expand the project’s enquiry into how place, identity, and emotion intersect across contemporary America. In Miami, Strydom reveals a city alive with tension and beauty, offering a deeper understanding of the broader landscape he continues to explore across the United States.
