Small towns. The very words often evoke disaffected communities where not much happens, lacking the buzz and snap of the city and instead characterized by stultifying monotony. Take Beaufort West, situated one third of the way along the 1,600-kilometer highway that runs through the flat, semidesert area of the Karoo on its way from Cape Town to Johannesburg. The South African Human Rights Commission describes Beaufort West as “an isolated town that has not broken away from the shackles of South Africa’s apartheid past, [where] economic and social integration is severely limited.”
Visitors slowing down to the speed limit of 60 kilometers an hour as they drive through the town before revving up to hit the long dusty road again are hardly aware that the red-roofed building on the large traffic island in the middle of Beaufort West is the town prison. But this fact struck young photographer Mikhael Subotzky in 2006, as he was investigating the history and character of Beaufort West, as particularly worthy of note. Prisons are usually hidden away in back areas.
Subotzky was intrigued because his final year exhibition at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town in 2004 was a photo essay on one of South Africa’s largest prisons, Cape Town’s Pollsmoor, where Subotzky spent most of three months getting to know prisoners, talking to them, teaching some to take black-and-white photographs, and taking photographs of his own. The resulting essay was entitled “Die Vier Hoeke,” the four corners, a graphic term used by the inmates to describe the limits of their world. Many of the images were panoramic, extended landscapes of confined men, and the series was powerful enough for Subotzky to be accepted into the elite New York photo agency Magnum as the youngest current member.
Some of the same stylistic approaches can be seen in his series on Beaufort West, shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in the fall of 2008, which portrays the town from a number of vantage points, domestic and communal, and not just the prison. There is the family and home of nineteen-year-old sex worker Michelle Mallies, whose clients are the truck drivers taking a break from the long night drive from Cape Town to Johannesburg; the town rubbish dump, where desperate scavengers poke for leftover food or goods; Mr. Roussouw’s old-fashioned antique store; and, of course, the prison, where the prisoners have painted a mural on the wall portraying the dry, desertlike countryside from which they are cut off.
The intense level of engagement Subotzky brings to his work seeps into each image, revealing a truth not only about Beaufort West but in the rather desperate lives of many of the inhabitants in marginalized small towns in struggling economies everywhere.
“Cell 33 E2 Section” 2005
Archival Inkjet print
Image courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
Collection: Museum of Modern Art New York
© Mikhael Subotzky
“Mr. Roussouw (behind desk), Beaufort West” 2006
LightJet C-print on Fuji Crystal Archive paper
128.66 x 105.5 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
© Mikhael Subotzky
“Beaufort West Prison (from the air)” 2006
LightJet C-print on Fuji Crystal Archive paper
128.66 x 105.5 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
© Mikhael Subotzky
“Beaufort West Prison” 2006
LightJet C-print on Fuji Crystal Archive paper
128.66 x 105.5 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
© Mikhael Subotzky