Mikhael Subotzky Maplank and Naomi, Pollsmoor Maximum Security Prison. Cape Town, South Africa. 2004. Inkjet print framed and mounted on Dibond with face-mounted toughened glass smashed by the artist.
“In January
(...) 2005, as a part of the work done for the photographic series Die Vier Hoeke, I organized the Prison Photo Workshops, teaching the basics of photography to ten inmates and two warders at Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town. Maplank and Naomi were two participants in these workshops. A few years after he was released, Maplank was stabbed to death near his home.
By then I had started smashing some of my photographs. I was retrospectively writing my own feelings of violence, trauma, and fear that came from both my experience of taking the photograph and my ambivalence at the representation I had made, back into the photographic object itself. I decided to only smash photographs which had a particular kind of emotional or representational tension, and in this case it had to do with the pain of losing somebody who had played a big role in my life and had become a good friend.
Both the Prison Photo Workshops (where I learnt a new form of working collaboratively,) and the Smashed series (where the illusion of a surface separation between object and subject is shattered) fundamentally changed my relationship to photography. Both were turning points, and in this work they come together.”
– Mikhael Subotzky © Mikhael Subotzky | Magnum Photos
