The Prison

Koto Bolofo was born in South Africa in 1959 and raised in Great Britain. Bolofo has photographed for magazines such as Vogue, Vanity Fair and GQ and made short films for the Berlinale and the Venice Film Festival. He has created advertising campaigns for companies including Hermès, Louis Vuitton and Dom Pérignon. Bolofo lives in the Vendée, France, and his books with Steidl include Lord Snowdon, Dreams, Horse Power, Venus Williams, I Spy with my Little Eye, Something beginning with S, Vroom! Vroom!, La Maison and Grande Complication.

Having left South Africa at the age of four as a political refugee with his parents, photographer Koto Bolofo returned to
his home country with his wife in 1992, two years after Nelson Mandela had been released from prison. Bolofo got free
access to the notorious and by now deserted prison of Robben Island, where Mandela had been held for the majority
of the twenty-seven years of his confinement in a cell of barely 6 square metres in Section B. The photographer and his
wife eagerly began documenting the site s abandoned interiors and surroundings, dreading the prison s potential closure.
Meanwhile, it was converted into a well-frequented museum in 1997 and included on the World Heritage List by
UNESCO in 1999.
The black and white photographs of this volume conspicuously favour close-up depictions of details as opposed to
general views: leftover items, barbed wire fences, spacious dormitories viewed through a spyhole, the key in the lock
to Mandela s cell which is so tiny it cannot be taken as a whole all this is conveying the gloomy sense of claustrophobia
and suppression that characterise the place. The camera is constantly searching for the few rays of light that penetrate
the ubiquitous grimness and silence of cruelty.