In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

MIKHAEL Untitled (Die Vier Hoeke), 2005, Printed panoram ic work 2 x (47 x 226 cm ) Courtesy Goodm an Gallery, Johannesburg. Ivor Powell 1 1 4 - N k a Journal of Contem porary African Art M ikhael Subotzky is just twenty-six years old. His first public exhibition, not counting the display of work assembled for his degree exhibition at the University of Cape Town's Michaelis School of Fine Art, was held in 2005. In the two-and-a-bit years and three solo shows since that time, Subotzky has been the recipient of more international and local awards than an artist can reasonably expect to garner in a lifetime: this year the French City of Perpignan's Not bad going for a young white South African artist, who, while he may get a few international kudos for being South African, and therefore, as these perceptions go, operates at the coalface of reality, by the same token, has a whole lot more to prove to the international community, and more specifically the kind of community that sets the agendas at events like the African continental photography showcase in Mali. It is easy to be impressed from the outset. But SUBOTZKY Young Photographer Award, as well as the KLM Paul Huff Award in Amsterdam; in 2006 the F25 Award for Concerned Photography, in Fabricia, Italy; the year before that the Special Jurors' Prize at the Sixth Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie , in Bamako, Mali, as well as a Merit Award at South Africa's Absa L'Atelier competition. There have also been fellowships and residencies and grants and invitations to peer workshops dripping with prestige, not even to mention the fact that Subotzky, in the interim, has been snapped up by the ultra-prestigious Magnum photo agency. it is also wise to be skeptical of such fairy-tale success . The road to artistic oblivion is littered with early, hardly thinking acclaim, and in today's postpost -post-whatever-you-like cultural environment , where artistic value or energy has more about it of centrifugal force than substance, the burden of recognition can weigh very heavily and very dead indeed once the spin stops spinning. I would venture to predict, however, that Subotzky, more than most of his lionized peers, will probably survive the cold glare of time in baleful retrospect. The main reason for this is that Subotzky is so Spring/ Sum m er 2008 l\ lka - 1 1 5 Samuel (standing), Vaalkoppies (Beaufort West rubbish dump), 2006. Lightjet C print on Fuji Crystal Archive Paper. Courtesy Goodm an Gallery Cape. startlingly traditional in his practice as an artist in the photographic medium. Typically, he takes a documentary subject—life in a prison, the varieties of experience in a small rural town—-and he seeks out telling, emblematic, ironical, or otherwise poignant moments to make up his portfolio of the subject as a whole. It's been done a thousand times before. Photography 101, located somewhere at the cusp between photography as a medium of direct record, and photography considered as an "art" medium. What is at stake, then, in judging or assessing artistic production in a mode such as Subotzky's is not so much what is being done as how well, how illuminatingly, how startlingly, how truly, how unexpectedly, how resonantly, even how beautifully it is being done. My point here is that, considered as an artist—and unusually in the fine-art photography context of today—there is little or no reliance on the conceptual premise of the work to carry its affect, or to lend any deferred significance , mystique (or, one might unkindly say: obfuscation). The photographs are pretty much what they are as photographs and they do not need the bolstering of discourse and explanation to make them speak. This is not to say that Subotzky's photography is either d u m b or lacking in conceptual edge or creative guile. In Subotzky's degree portfolio, entitled Die Vier Hoeke (The Four Corners) and focusing on Cape Town's Pollsmoor Prison, by way of example, there is uncompromising and palpable 1 1 6 ' N k a Journal of Contem porary African Art rectilinearity that both...

pdf

Share