Millefoto

Millefoto Official page of Professional Photographer and Videographer, Johnny Miller. Based in Cape Town, South Africa. Code For Africa News Fellow.

Official page of the professional photographer Johnny Miller. Specializing in documentary style photography with interests in urbanization, inequality, and poverty. See more at www.millefoto.com and www.unequalscenes.com.

Zambia is a country that is “balancing” — balancing the legacy of the Copperbelt with ambitions to become a hub for the ...
26/05/2026

Zambia is a country that is “balancing” — balancing the legacy of the Copperbelt with ambitions to become a hub for the minerals of the green transition, balancing Chinese investment against Western courtship, balancing a fragile hydropower grid against an unforgiving climate, balancing the comfortable mythology of a “peaceful democracy” against widening cracks underneath.

But it’s also a place where the cost of that balancing act is paid almost entirely by people and ecosystems with no seat at the table, and nowhere is the resulting tension between aspiration and reality more visible than in Lusaka. Southern Africa is one of the most unequal regions in the world, and Lusaka wears that inequality on the surface: a city whose population has grown almost tenfold in five decades and where roughly 70% of residents now live in unplanned settlements, the “compounds” of Kanyama, Chibolya, Misisi, Ngombe, stitched together from cinder block, corrugated iron, and improvisation.

From the air, Dubai reads as a single triumphant gesture: the world’s tallest tower, islands shaped like palms, a skylin...
26/05/2026

From the air, Dubai reads as a single triumphant gesture: the world’s tallest tower, islands shaped like palms, a skyline conjured out of desert in a single generation. It is one of the most photographed cities on earth, and almost none of those photographs include the people who built it.

They are not hard to find. The UAE holds the highest proportion of international migrants of any country in the world: migrant workers make up roughly 88 percent of the population, around 8.7 million people out of some 10 million. The gleaming country, in other words, is a place where the overwhelming majority can never belong. Citizenship is, for nearly all of them, unattainable no matter how long they stay, and with it go the welfare, housing, subsidised healthcare and political voice reserved for the Emirati minority. Migration scholars have a clinical name for this arrangement: “differential exclusion.” You may have full access to the labour market and none at all to the society it sustains.

The mechanism is the kafala, or sponsorship, system, which ties a worker’s legal status directly to a single employer. Human Rights Watch has documented for years how this hands employers extraordinary power: to confiscate passports, to withhold wages, to brand a worker who walks away as an “absconder” facing detention and deportation. Recruitment fees charged back home leave many arriving already in debt, a debt repaid through the very wages they crossed an ocean to earn.

Dubai: Unequal Scenes (link in bio)

Another big moment for and for drone journalism.Work from our wider ecosystem was recently featured in major news outle...
12/03/2026

Another big moment for and for drone journalism.

Work from our wider ecosystem was recently featured in major news outlets and with Anderson Cooper. The 60 Minutes piece used South Africa to interrogate a globally amplified misinformation narrative about so-called “white genocide.” It looked at the claim, amplified by Trump and others, that white South African farmers are victims of a targeted genocide, and then actually went to South Africa to test that narrative against reporting, interviews and what could be observed on the ground.

The segment sits inside the larger political story of the U.S. making a special refugee exception for white South Africans, essentially closing down refugee resettlement from everywhere else in the world except for them. Drone imagery works especially well in this context because inequality is not abstract, it’s built into the landscape. From above, the enduring spatial legacy of apartheid becomes immediately legible in the stark proximity of privilege and exclusion. This is why drone journalism still matters, even as the ecosystem around drone use in Africa and around the world have changed drastically since our founding.

10/03/2026

I built a World Drone Map where everything a drone pilot needs is in one place.

It brings together drone laws, verified operators, and resources in one easy to use tool.

Check it out: worlddronemap.com

I first visited Makoko, Lagos, in 2024 while photographing the city’s waterfront communities with . This weekend, large...
19/01/2026

I first visited Makoko, Lagos, in 2024 while photographing the city’s waterfront communities with . This weekend, large sections of the settlement were demolished by the government displacing thousands of residents.

Authorities cited public safety concerns, pointing to the proximity of some structures to high-voltage transmission lines. Residents say they initially cooperated with demolitions after being told that only buildings within a defined setback would be affected. They later reported that demolitions extended hundreds of metres beyond what was originally communicated, without the release of a publicly available, site-specific plan. (You can see the electricity lines in question in picture #4)

Makoko sits adjacent to the Third Mainland Bridge, one of the main arteries connecting Lagos to Victoria Island and the city’s commercial centre. Its location makes the area highly attractive for redevelopment as Lagos’s wealthier districts continue to expand.

The clearance recalls the 1990 eviction of Maroko, where hundreds of thousands of residents were displaced and the land later redeveloped into high-value estates. Similar patterns have played out across many rapidly growing cities, where informal settlements in strategic locations are removed rather than upgraded, reinforcing existing inequalities instead of addressing them.

Great reporting by and amazing photos from and

Jakarta, Indonesia 🇮🇩. Mass protests have shaken Jakarta, triggered by anger over what demonstrators describe as excessi...
01/09/2025

Jakarta, Indonesia 🇮🇩. Mass protests have shaken Jakarta, triggered by anger over what demonstrators describe as excessive pay and housing allowances for lawmakers.

The unrest, Indonesia’s worst in decades, has already left at least five people dead and caused widespread rioting, arson, and looting. Homes of political leaders and government buildings were attacked, while markets tumbled.

Perhaps it’s worth reflecting that in deeply unequal societies, the social compact is fragile, leading to repressive tactics, mistrust, and occasionally violence. While house sizes are not always the best way to gauge economic inequality on a countrywide scale, they do serve as a visual proxy for disparity and as a symbol. In Jakarta’s Pondok Indah neighborhood, there are mansions next to poor homes, in the Ciliwung River, men wade through polluted water in the shadow of luxury hotels, and in North Jakarta fancy shopping malls tower above kampungs like citadels.

President Prabowo Subianto, facing his most serious challenge since taking office, announced yesterday that lawmakers’ benefits would be cut and overseas trips suspended. Yet student groups and civil society leaders insist this does not address the root causes: entrenched political oligarchy and deepening inequality in Southeast Asia’s largest economy.

The protests highlight the growing frustration with rising living costs, corruption, and economic disparities, even as Indonesia remains the world’s fourth most populous nation with major growth potential.

Unequalscenes.com/jakarta

Santos, Brazil’s historic port city, was once the global epicenter of the coffee trade. In the 19th century, millions of...
06/08/2025

Santos, Brazil’s historic port city, was once the global epicenter of the coffee trade. In the 19th century, millions of sacks flowed through its docks, fueling both Brazil’s economy and the fortunes of coffee barons. 💰☕️

But that prosperity was built on the backs of enslaved Africans and poor migrant labor. The port remains Latin America’s busiest, now moving containers instead of beans—but inequality still defines the city. Opulent mansions and office blocks stand in front of working-class neighborhoods and aging port infrastructure. Palafitas (stilted townships) hang precariously over the water.

Moreover, the mangroves of Santos are a highly productive ecosystem. The residents of Ilha Diana, population 100, mostly live by arranging fishing tours. The expansion of the port threatens them, and the fishing grounds, by disrupting the balance between fresh water and salt water with dredging, pollution and increased marine traffic. Santos is a reminder: global trade routes often begin in places shaped by exploitation and uneven progress.

Thanks to everyone who helped make these photos (tagged).

You can find my new “São Paulo” page link in my bio.

Latin American Inequality ⚖️ - The just used these images to describe the regions inequality as “extraordinary”. Tldr (...
07/06/2025

Latin American Inequality ⚖️ - The just used these images to describe the regions inequality as “extraordinary”.

Tldr (so you don’t have to read the article): GDP growth and social policies in the early 2000s, which reduced inequality, have gone away and/or stagnated. The region relies heavily on regressive taxation such as VAT instead of income. And lastly, much inequality is inherited. This means that if your parents are poor, you will usually end up…poor.

Someone asked me the other day on stage “well how can we reduce inequality?” I laughed because it’s not a simple thing to do. But the answer, I realized, IS fairly simple: tax, and redistribute. We have done it before in the past, and we can do it again. The mechanisms of redistribution are not complex. The political will to do so, is.

Photo locations:
1. “The Wall of Shame”, Lima, Peru 🇵🇪
2. “The Most Famous Photo of Inequality”, São Paulo, Brazil 🇧🇷
3. Guatemala City, Guatemala 🇬🇹
4. Panama City, Panama 🇵🇦
5. Santiago, Chile 🇨🇱
6. Buenos Aires, Argentina 🇦🇷
7. Mexico City, Mexico 🇲🇽
8. Bogotá, Colombia 🇨🇴

Cleveland, Ohio is a compact, medium-sized city on Lake Erie, shaped by the same Rust Belt story as many Midwestern citi...
30/05/2025

Cleveland, Ohio is a compact, medium-sized city on Lake Erie, shaped by the same Rust Belt story as many Midwestern cities: a 20th-century industrial boom followed by long decline. After WWII, many African-Americans migrated north seeking jobs and housing, settling in Cleveland neighborhoods like this one near Shaker Heights.

By 1959, tensions flared between the two communities. Shaker Heights considered traffic barriers between them, but it wasn’t until 1976 that temporary barrels were placed on six Lomond neighborhood streets. Many Cleveland residents saw this as racially driven, calling it “the Berlin Wall for black people.”

In 1985, a court ordered the barriers removed at Shaker Heights’ expense. But a 60-day reprieve delayed removal, and in 1987, the Ohio Supreme Court upheld Shaker Heights’ right to keep the barricades, calling them constitutional.

Today, the communities are racially mixed. Critics of the “racist reasoning” argument note that Shaker Heights wasn’t exclusively white in the 1970s, highlighting the blurry line between race, class, and wealth. Similar barriers exist in Grosse Pointe, Detroit, and beyond, outlasting their original populations by decades.

In Shaker Heights, the bollards and planters seem like relics. Residents might not notice them anymore, but my project here, and in other cities, is to highlight these absurd, visible design features of separation. The hope is to spark conversations about exclusion, fragmentation, and the meaning of “community.”

Barriers today are subtler than concrete walls; they’re paywalls, access codes, austerity cuts, and glass ceilings. Yet, whether physical or digital, they persist. These old barricades will crumble over time, but will we rebuild them in new forms?

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