Photographer Mikhael Subotzky’s twin bodies of work, Die Vier Hoeke and Umjiegwana, represent his first major solo show since the launch of the Nelson Mandela Centre at Pollsmoor last year. This was Die Vier Hoeke‘s first public showcasing.
After favourable media mileage and rapturously received appearances at prestigious events such as the Art Basel 2005 (Miami and Switzerland), the T1: The Turin Triennial and the Rencontres Photographiques De Bamako 2005, public curiosity about Subotzky’s output is at its peak. Many observers want to see whether the young photographer can outdo the explosiveness of his initial peep show of South African prisons, which earned him full marks in 2004 at his alma mater, the Michaelis School of Fine Arts in Cape Town.
Die Vier Hoeke (The Four Corners) was shot over a period of about three months in late 2004 and early last year. After a pause — in which he became increasingly “concerned” about incarceration and its politics — Subotzky embarked on the follow-up collection, Umjiegwana (The Outside), which looks at ex-prisoners and the hardships they face once out of jail.
A truncated showing of Die Vier Hoeke at the Goodman Gallery functions as a scene setter, contextualising the wintry images that snake around the perimeter of this gallery. Aptly bleak and natural in colour, these pictures display an uncanny loyalty to the artist’s premise of showing the similarities between two supposedly disparate worlds. To many of Subotzky’s subjects, as The Number author Jonny Steinberg muses in his introductory statement, Die Vier Hoeke and Umjiegwana have been “inverted” and have, perhaps, always been.
Joseph, Umjiekwana’s poster boy who is featured in the most literal and possibly most frivolous depiction of this inversion, states: “When I left prison, I worked for the white man in his garden. That was a good time because I had money. But when he saw my tattoo, he sent me away. I haven’t found work since. Prison was easier, because everything was free.”
By relying on the wit of his subjects or the eloquence of his own photography, or both, Subotzky drives Joseph’s point home over and over again throughout the exhibition.
While there is the eccentric Joseph on one hand, there is the seemingly accidental profundity of an image of Mark, whose pulling of seaweed at Hout Bay beach mimics the warders’ tugging of the shackles inside Pollsmoor — a photograph positioned just an eye’s glance away.
Whether driven by naivety or irreverence, Subotzky stepped into the firing line of South Africa’s preoccupation with political correctness. “I’m influenced by a long tradition of documentary photography that is socially committed but, in itself, is not without its problems as a medium,” he says.
He sidesteps the clichéd images of “prisoners behind bars” but, by his own admission, most forms of representation have problems and challenges, in particular when people different from oneself are represented. The fact that he’s not a prisoner, for example, definitely affected the range of Die Vier Hoeke. Being a white boy stepping into “die vier hoeke” — a ghetto with different rules, but a ghetto nonetheless — did present a unique set of problems, foremost of which was the question of access.
Subotzky glosses over the details of the “uncomfortable moments”, the hostile or unwilling participants who would glare at the camera in contempt or who would focus elsewhere in resignation. Although he ventured deep into the prison, the images he chose to show depict little beyond routine activity and gross overcrowding to avoid sensationalism. However, in an article by Sean O’Toole in i-D magazine, Subotzky says, “A couple of prisoners were quite critical of me. They said nothing that usually happens would happen while I was there.”
Seemingly, Subotzky had no such problems with Umjiegwana. He captures several private, intimate and disparaging moments, such as Vallen and friends preparing a bottle neck while a toddler mimics them in anticipation.
At his opening, I saw reactions ranging from disdain to physical discomfort. Others were shocked by the prices, which range from R13 000 to R30 000. Some were moved to tears by what they witnessed. Whichever way public sentiment swayed, for Subotzky it was mission accomplished if he got people to see the images. “Whether they elicit an emotional response depends on the person,” he says. “I tried to make them visually compelling images that asked to be looked at [so people would] consider what’s going on there. Hopefully the discussion will get them to look at the world around them.”
Subotzky will be presenting the rest of Die Vier Hoeke series, together with photographs from the workshops he hosted with prisoners during his year working in Pollmoor Prison.
Mikhael Subotzky will be exhibiting at Constitution Hill from February 25 to March 25 2006. For more information, call (011) 381 3118