Mikhael Subotzky Livres

Retinal Shift is the catalogue for Mikhael Subotzky's 2012 Standard Bank Young Artist Exhibition, which will tour every major museum in South Africa. Retinal Shift investigates the practice and mechanics of looking - in relation to the history of Grahamstown, the history of photographic devices, and Subotzky's own history as an artist. The works draw on archival portraits from the last century, found surveillance footage, as well as Subotzky's own photographs from various series' that he re-contextualizes. The opening work in the book is a self-portrait that Subotzky made with the assistance of an optometrist. High-resolution images of his left and right retinas sit side by side. Says Subotzky: "I was fascinated by this encounter. At the moment that my retinas, parts of my essential organs of seeing, were photographed, I was blinded by the apparatus that made the images.

Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse worked at Ponte City, the iconic Johannesburg apartment building and Africa’s tallest residential skyscraper, for more than six years. There they photographed its residents and exhaustively documented the building—every door, the view from every window, the image on every television screen. This remarkable body of photographs appears here in counterpoint to an extensive archive of found material and historical documents; a sustained sequence of essays and documentary texts is also integrated into the visual story. In the essays, some of South Africa’s leading scholars and writers explore Ponte City’s unique place in Johannesburg and in the imagination of its citizens. What emerges is a complex portrait of a place shaped by contending projections, a single, unavoidable building seen as refuge and monstrosity, dreamland and dystopia, a lightning rod for a society’s hopes and fears, and always a beacon to navigate by. This long-term project received the Discovery Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles in 2011. The first edition of Ponte City, published by Steidl in 2014 and now out-of-print, was awarded the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2015.