lightjet C-print on Fuji Crystal Archive Paper

Artwork date: 2006
Exhibited: Saatchi Gallery, London, Out of Focus: Photography, 25 April to 22 July 2012, another example from the edition exhibited. Museum of Modern Art, New York, New Photography 2008: Josephine Meckseper and Mikhael Subotzky, 10 September 2008 to 12 January 2009, another example from the edition exhibited. Studio La Citta, Verona, Beaufort West, December 2007, another example from the edition exhibited. Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, Beaufort West, October 2007, another example from the edition exhibited. FOAM (Foto Museum Amsterdam), Amsterdam, 21 September to 11 November 2007 another example from the edition exhibited.
Literature: Ewing, W.A. (2012). Out of Focus: Photography, London: Saatchi Gallery and Booth-Clibborn Editions, another example from the edition illustrated on p.MSY.5, exhibition catalogue for Out of Focus: Photography, Saatchi Gallery, London, 25 April to 22 July 2012. Steinberg, J. and Subotzky, M. (2008). Beaufort West. London: Chris Boot Ltd, another example from the edition illustrated in colour on p.12.

(1)

image size: 82 x 100 cm

Notes:

Working across a variety of mediums, Mikhael Subotzky’s practice continues to defy categorization, producing important works from the traditions of painting, printmaking, film installation, photography and the genre-defying Sticky-tape transfers. From this broad oeuvre, Subotzky’s early photographic series remain among his best-known works. Beaufort West catapulted Subotzky to international recognition with its exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2008-9. The series was also his first photobook, published to coincide with the opening of the exhibition.The series was shot in and around the Great Karoo desert town from which the series takes its name, then with a population of around 38 000. Beaufort West is a rural community with a sizable prison adjacent to its town centre. As South Africa continues to come to terms with the impact of high unemployment and ongoing flight to major cities, author Jonny Friedman paints the images from Beaufort West as a liminal space, saying:‘...Subotzky’s photographs give you the sense that you are looking at something you have always known and yet have never seen. It is not just that the Karoo landscape in his pictures is inhabited. It is that the landscape is so patently a backdrop to the imaginings of the people in the photographs. They are using it: to transport themselves, to elevate themselves, to re-describe themselves. In picturing them Subotzky does more than simply stitch the desert and the people back together. He takes us on a sometimes disquieting adventure, asking us to imagine how the desert is imagined by those who live there…Almost every photograph carries a suggestion of theatre, and almost every theatre uses the desert as its stage. The boy on the rubbish heap who has donned the Spider-Man mask he found in the trash...In each photograph the subjects transport themselves elsewhere: where, precisely, we are not sure.

Kathryn Del Boccio

Sources:

^[1] Steinberg, J. and Subotzky, M. (2008). Beaufort West. London: Chris Boot Ltd, p.75.