While Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse’s photographic engagement with Ponte City was largely premised on seriality and repetition as a formal device towards a social portrait of the building – the pair cataloguing each window, door, and television in the highrise – the more incidental images included in the project serve to illuminate the lives of its individual residents. Among them is this untitled photograph, picturing a young child on tiptoes in a sunny orange dress, who beams with delight as an older girl sweeps the floor behind her. During the course of their project, Subotzky and Waterhouse came to know several of the building’s resident children; a changing, transient cast that precluded any lasting connections or continuity. Few families stayed long in the tower. This playful, unremarkable moment stands as a counterpoint to the dominant narrative of Ponte as a site of decay or danger. Children make do; fun will be found; a game is always at hand. Joy and resilience persist within a structure so often viewed from a distance and in disdain: a feature of the skyline, an emblem of municipal ineptitude. Seldom home; never refuge. Into this photograph are folded all such contradictions of place.