Photographer Mikhael Subotzky

The history of documentary photography plays a decisive role in Mikhael Subotzky’s work. At an early age, the artist was exposed to the activist work of his uncle, Gideon Mendel, one of South Africa’s notable “struggle photographers,” and he grew up in a milieu of commitment to social democracy. [+] more
During his student years at the University of Cape Town, he was influenced by the artist David Goldblatt’s vast photographic corpus, which captures the country’s landscape and social fabric during colonialist and postapartheid eras, and the oeuvres of photographers Walker Evans and Joseph Koudelka. Subotzky’s student thesis project, completed in 2004, is a series of panoramic photographs of prisoners in the notorious Pollsmoor Maximum Security Prison, in which former South African president Nelson Mandela spent several of the twenty‑seven years of his political imprisonment. The project, titled The Four Corners (Die Vier Hoeke)—in Afrikaans slang, “the four corners” refers to the inside of a prison—was inspired by a 1999 constitutional decree that allowed prisoners to vote in South Africa’s elections. It is the artist’s first inquiry into the prison system that is a critical subject of South African history.

                                                         >>>Mikhael Subotzky