After a fight, Die Lane, Beaufort West, 2006. © Mikhael Subotzky/Goodman Gallery, Cape Town

Mikhael Subotzky‘s After a fight is part of our Benefit Silent Auction. South-African photographer Subotzky’s Beaufort West series captures a rural, impoverished, and crime-ridden South African town. Beaufort West is a town which sits off of the longest highway in South Africa and is host to a small prison. As Jonny Steinberg describes, in the afterward to Subotzky’s book Beaufort West (Chris Boot, 2008), the prison is often ignored by the average city-dwelling South African passerby, but is so devastatingly resonant in the minds of Beaufort West residents: “here is somewhere increasingly forgotten by post apartheid South Africa. And yet those who inhabit the country’s metropolis pass through in their millions; and those who are failing most miserably here, who wind up again and again in the town’s jail, get to rotate between a life in the township and a life in the middle of the highway, quite literally listening to the traffic of an economy in which they can find no place. It is as if a never-ending jamboree is passing through Beaufort West, and those most embittered by the spectacle have been sentenced to sit in front-row seats.”  Subotzky’s work aids the inhabitants of Beaufort West in their attempt to reclaim their voice within their society’s culture. Or as Steinberg concludes, his photographs “give expression to something one understands – even while choosing to forget.”

Mikhael Subotzky (b. 1981, Cape Town) is a member of Magnum Photos and is represented by Goodman Gallery and Studio La Citta. Subotzky’s work has been exhibited widely in major galleries and museums, and his prints are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the South African National Gallery, Cape Town; the Johannesburg Art Gallery; and FOAM (FotoMuseum Amsterdam). He currently lives in Johannesburg.

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Grande Hotel, Beira, Mozambique, 2008. © Guy Tillim

Appropriated Landscapes

Exhibition on view:
June 16th, 2011–May 13th, 2012

The Walther Collection:
Reichenauerstrasse 21
89233 Neu-Ulm / Burlafingen
Germany
+49 731 1769 143

The Walther Collection’s Appropriated Landscapes is a group exhibition focusing on contemporary landscape photography. The exhibit explores a wide range of issues—including war, colonization, and ideology—and their effects on the Southern African landscape. Appropriated Landscapes attempts to expand the definition of  “landscape” beyond geographical or physical space, by looking at it as a mental and social construct that influences individual and cultural identity. The exhibit features fourteen artists, including three photographers who have been previously published in Aperture: Mitch Epstein, Mikhael Subotzky, and Guy Tillim were featured in issues 168, 188, and 193, respectively.

Breaking in, Rustdene Township, Beaufort West, 2006, Mikhael Subotzky

New Photography 2008: Josephine Meckseper and Mikhael Subotzky

Exhibition on view: September 10, 2008–January 5, 2009

The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street
New York, NY

New Photography, an annual fall showcase at MoMA, features the work of Mikhael Subotzky, who appeared in issue 188 of Aperture magazine. The exhibition will feature his most recent series, Beaufort West. This series portrays an impoverished desert town between Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa.

Born in Cape Town, Subotzky, 26, has received several awards since graduating from the University of Cape Town in 2004. By taking pictures of his native land, the young Magnum photographer attempts, “to make sense of the very strange world that I see around me. I don’t ever expect to achieve that understanding, but the fact that I am trying comforts me.”

Josephine Meckseper will be featured in the exhibition as well.