Hechenblaikners intimate knowledge of the subject, the greatperseverance and patience he brings to bear when pursuing how eventculture and mass tourism have mutilated the former mountain farmerscountry, make him the most expressive documentarian of todaysAlpine reality. Tobia Bezzola Have fun reads a sign on a ski run, aphotograph of which opens Winter Wonderland. And fun we haveexploring these images of Hechenblaikners native Tyrol includingmasses of fans at a ski event, fireworks illuminating slopes atnight, ski lifts in the off-season navigating rocky outcrops, andrubbish in the snow after a day of revelry. This book is adocumentation of this landscape and an ironic look at theperversion of Alpine culture that shapes it in the interest ofcommerce.
Retinal Shift is the catalogue for Mikhael Subotzkys 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 Subotzkys own history as an artist. The works draw on archival portraits from the last century, found surveillance footage, as well as Subotzkys 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 was born in 1981 in Cape Town and is currently based in Johannesburg. Subotzky adopts the directness of the social document