Mikhael Subotzky (born Cape Town, South Africa, 1981) is a South African artist based in Johannesburg. His installation, film, video and photographic work have been exhibited widely in museums and galleries, and received awards including the KLM Paul Huf Award, W. Eugene Smith Grant, Oskar Barnack Award and the Discovery Award at Rencontres d'Arles. He has published the books Beaufort West (2008), Retinal Shift (2012) and, with Patrick Waterhouse, Ponte City (2014). Subotzky is a member of Magnum Photos and his work is held in the collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. [1] [2]
Subotzky graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 2004.
For his book Beaufort West, Subotzky photographed in and around a prison built within a traffic circle in the town of Beaufort West. [3] [4]
For six years he and Patrick Waterhouse collaborated in photographing in Ponte City, a 54-storey cylindrical building in Johannesburg – the tallest residential tower block in Africa – resulting in their book and exhibition Ponte City. [5] They photographed the residents, interiors and exteriors of the building, and produced a series of giant tableaux, made up of hundreds of contact sheets, presented in towering light boxes. [6] Their book Ponte City won the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2015. [7]
Subotzky became a Magnum Photos nominee in 2007 and a full member in 2011.
Subotzky's work is held in the following permanent collections:
Ponte City is a skyscraper in the Berea district of Johannesburg, South Africa, just next to Hillbrow. It was built in 1975 to a height of 173 m (567.6 ft), and was the tallest residential skyscraper in Africa for 48 years, until overtaken in 2023 by Building D01, in Egypt's New Administrative Capital. The 55-storey building is cylindrical, with an open centre allowing additional light into the apartments. The centre space is known as "the core" and rises above an uneven rock floor. When built, Ponte City was seen as an extremely desirable address due to its location and views over Johannesburg, but it became infamous for its crime and poor maintenance in the late 1980s to 1990s. It has since been refurbished into a safe property. The neon sign on top of the building is the largest sign in the Southern Hemisphere. Prior to 2000, it advertised the Coca-Cola Company. In 2000, this was replaced by a banner promoting South African branch of Vodacom. Vodacom rebranded in 2023 to advertise VodaPay, a digital wallet system.
African Photography Encounters, more commonly known as Bamako Encounters, is a biennial exhibition in Bamako, Mali, held since 1994. It is the first and largest African photography biennial. The exhibition, featuring exhibits by contemporary African photographers, is spread over several Bamako cultural centers, including the National Museum, the National Library, the Modibo Keïta memorial, and the District Museum. The exhibition also features colloquia and film showings.
Paul Graham is a British fine-art and documentary photographer. He has published three survey monographs, along with 26 other dedicated books.
Anders Petersen is a Swedish photographer, based in Stockholm. He makes intimate and personal documentary-style black and white photographs. Petersen has published more than 20 books. He has had exhibitions at Bibliothèque nationale de France, Liljevalchs konsthall, MARTa Herford, and Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome. His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Moderna Museet in Stockholm.
Luc Delahaye is a French photographer known for his large-scale color works depicting conflicts, world events or social issues. His pictures are characterized by detachment, directness and rich details, a documentary approach which is however countered by dramatic intensity and a narrative structure.
Claudine Doury is a French photographer living in Paris. She has been a member of Agence Vu since 1991. In 1999, she received the Leica Oskar Barnack award as well as a World Press Photo award for her work on the "Peoples of Siberia", and the Niépce Prize in 2004. Her Siberian work has been shown in a solo exhibition at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize is awarded annually by the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation and the Photographers' Gallery to a photographer who has made the most significant contribution to the photographic medium in Europe during the past year.
The Rencontres d'Arles is an annual summer photography festival founded in 1970 by the Arles photographer Lucien Clergue, the writer Michel Tournier and the historian Jean-Maurice Rouquette.
The Walther Collection is a private non-profit organization dedicated to researching, collecting, exhibiting, and publishing modern and contemporary photography and video art. The collection has two exhibition spaces: the Walther Collection in Neu-Ulm/Burlafingen, in Germany, and the Walther Collection Project Space in New York City.
Jane Evelyn Atwood is an American photographer, who has been living in Paris since 1971. Working primarily with documentary photography, Atwood typically follows groups of people or individuals, focusing mostly on people who are on the fringes of society. Atwood has had ten books of her work published, and received the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography, the Grand Prix Paris Match for Photojournalism, the Oskar Barnack Award, the Alfred Eisenstadt Award and the Hasselblad Foundation Grant twice.
Artur Walther is a German-American art collector focused on exhibiting and publishing contemporary photography and video art. A graduate of Harvard Business School, Walther was a General Partner at Goldman Sachs until his retirement in 1994. He began collecting photography in the late 1990s and later established The Walther Collection, which is open to the public at its museum campus in Neu-Ulm, Germany and its Project Space in New York City.
Davide Monteleone is an Italian visual artist, researcher, and National Geographic Fellow. His multidisciplinary work encompasses photography, visual journalism, writing, and interdisciplinary projects, focusing on themes such as geopolitics, geography, identity, data, and science.
Tomas van Houtryve is a Belgian visual artist, director and cinematographer working mainly with photography and video. He is known for using a wide range of contemporary and early image-making techniques. Van Houtryve is a Fellow at Columbia University's Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, an Emeritus member of the VII Photo Agency, a National Geographic Explorer since 2024, and a Contributing Artist for Harper's Magazine.
The Leica Oskar Barnack Award, presented almost continuously since 1979, recognizes photography expressing the relationship between man and the environment. It was known as the Oskar Barnack Award when presented by World Press Photo between 1979 and 1992, and has been known as the Leica Oskar Barnack Award while presented by Leica Camera since 1995.
Mack is an independent art and photography publishing house based in London. Mack works with established and emerging artists, writers and curators, and cultural institutions, releasing around 40 books per year. The publisher was founded in 2010 in London by Michael Mack.
Laia Abril is a Catalan artist whose work relates to bio-politics, grief and women’s rights. Her books include The Epilogue (2014), which documents the indirect victims of eating disorders; and a long-term project A History of Misogyny which includes On Abortion (2018), about the repercussions of abortion controls in many cultures; and On Rape (2022) about gender-based stereotypes and myths, as well as the failing structures of law and order, that perpetuate rape culture.
Patrick Waterhouse is a British artist. His work involves photography, drawing and graphic design. He has published books of his work and been exhibited internationally. Since 2011 he has been editor-in-chief of Colors magazine. In the same year he won the Discovery Award at Les Rencontres d'Arles for Ponte City, a collaboration with Mikhael Subotzky.
Le Bal is an independent arts centre in Paris. It focuses on documentary photography, video, cinema and new media through exhibitions, production, book publishing, talks and debates.
Rafał Milach is a Polish visual artist and photographer. His work focuses on the tension between society and power structures. Author of protest books and critical publications on state control. He is a full member of Magnum Photos and lectures in photography at the Krzysztof Kieślowski Film School at the Silesian University in Katowice
Clément Chéroux is a French photography historian and curator. He is Chief Curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He has also held senior curatorial positions at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Chéroux has overseen many exhibitions and books on photographers and photography.
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