archival pigment inks on 100% cotton rag paper

Artwork date: 2004
Signature details: signed, dated and numbered 1/5 in pencil in the margin
Exhibited: Another example from this edition exhibited at Pollsmoor Maximum Security Prison, Die Vier Hoeke, 27 April 2005. Another example from this edition exhibited at ABSA Gallery, Johannesburg, ABSA L’Atelier, 26 July to 26 August 2005. Another example from this edition exhibited at Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto, Still Revolution: Suspended in Time, 1 May to 14 June 2009.

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sheet size: 46.5 x 225 cm

Notes:

To Mikhael Subotzky the camera is more than “an engine of fact”, reproducing the visible world on command (Sekula, 1999). It is an instrument of understanding, leading the artist from the prisons of Cape Town to the high rises of Johannesburg for the sake of knowledge. “My process of making photographs,” Subotzky says, “feels like a part of my own personal duty to make myself as conscious as possible of the world around me” (2006). Because of this agenda, tempered by a strong sense of social responsibility, Subotzky’s practice sits uneasily within a documentary tradition where the photographer’s authority is often paramount. His images are as compelling as the best examples of the genre, but they are also consistently self-aware, exposing photographer and subject equally.Understandably, the young artist’s rise has been meteoric. Subotzky’s first body of photographic work, Die Vier Hoeke, toured South Africa, while his second, Beaufort West, earned him a show at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York in 2008. The Standard Bank Young Artist Award followed in 2012, chased by the 2015 Deutsche Borse Photography Prize for Ponte City, a six-year photographic collaboration with British photographer Patrick Waterhouse. Ponte City’s sprawling visuals have set the tone for the artist’s new work, ever more an engagement with the nature and politics of looking itself. A video installation from Show ‘n Tell, the latest chapter in Subotzky’s ongoing exploration of vision, was curated onto the 56^th Venice Biennale in 2015.Extracted from Die Vier Hoeke – now legendary as the only graduate exhibition to attain full marks at UCT’s Michaelis School of Fine Art – Cell 508 stitches several photographs into one long panorama. Although undeniably beautiful, the work is far from straightforward. The subjects, all prison inmates, perform for the camera like actors on a crowded stage, confronting the viewer with his or her own uncritical voyeurism. It is an image that, like all of Subotzky’s work, solicits closer examination and rewards attention.

Anna Stielau

Sources:

Subotzky, M., & Godby, M. 2006. ‘Inside and Outside: Mikhael Subotzky in Conversation with Michael Godby’. Kronos, (32), 6-15.

Sekula, A. 1999. ‘Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary’ in Dismal Science, Photo Works 1972-1996. Illinois: Illinois State University.