Mikhael Subotzky

Contestants in the Fancy Dress Competition at the Beaufort West Show (0275), 2006

Beaufort West takes its name from a small Karoo town on the N1 between Cape Town and Johannesburg. Subotzky was drawn there by an unusual piece of geography: a prison established in 1873 sitting inside a traffic circle at the intersection of the town's main street and the national highway. From that starting point the work expanded to take in the full social landscape of the town, shot on a medium-format camera in available light.

The series documents the populations that circle each other in and around Beaufort West: inmates, outcasts, families, residents, and passersby in what has been described as a stirring vision of South Africa's strained post-apartheid condition