Deutsche Borse Photography Prize at The Photographers’ Gallery

Date: 17-04-2005
Owning Institution: The photographers Gallery, courtesy Luc Delahaye
Publication:     Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2012  
Subject:   Now    

The Photography Prize, run annually by the Photographers’ Gallery in central London, is now in its ninth year and has acquired a status in its field roughly equivalent to that of the Turner Prize in contemporary art – which was, in fact, its original inspiration. The lines of demarcation between the two awards have become increasingly difficult to draw, in recent years, given that so many contemporary artists use photographic media so extensively in their work. But whereas the Turner Prize is only given to British artists under a certain age, the Photography Prize – sponsored this year for the first time by Deutsche Borse – operates no such restrictions, being open to photographers of any age and nationality. This year’s shortlist is arguably the strongest yet, and certainly the most varied.

The French photographer Luc Delahaye (born 1962) has been nominated for his panoramic photographs of scenes from contemporary history, ranging from the war in Iraq to the trial of Slobodan Milosevic. J.H. Engstrom (born 1969), is a Swedish photographer selected for a very different body of work, autobiographical in content and lyrical in mood. Jorg Sasse (born 1962) appropriates found pictures and manipulating them in a variety of intriguing ways. The last nominee, Stephen Shore, by some distance the most senior photographer on the list (born 1947), has been selected for a new and expanded edition of a book of photographs originally taken on the road in America in the 1970s and entitled Uncommon Places. The exhibition of shortlisted work which opened last week is necessarily limited in scale, given the modest dimensions of the Photographers’ Gallery. Nevertheless, it amounts to an impressive and sensitively hung display of pictures by some of the most gifted and original photographers at work today.

The exhibition opens with the work of the youngest of the four, J.H. Engstrom, who has been nominated for his book Trying to Dance, which consists of a sequence of self-portraits, portraits, landscapes and still lifes taken between 1998 and 2002. The pictures vary widely in mood and subject matter, although they all have certain formal features in common, notably a carefully cultivated lack of perfection. Engstrom courts effects of blur and overexposure and seems to mind not in the least if the traces of his own fingerprints mark the negatives from which his pictures are printed. His bleached-out portraits of friends and of himself, generally naked, have an awkward poignancy and directness about them. The sitters stare into the camera, not confrontationally but informally; one just shows her naked back to the photographer, speckled with traces of her recently cut hair.

Engstrom’s black-and-white portraits are reminiscent of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century photographs taken by painters, such as Eakins and Munch. The photographer has said that he wants to capture not just what a person looks like, but that elusive chimera, their “presence”. His pictures evoke an old, superstitious belief in photography’s mediumistic powers, prevalent in the early days of the camera – a belief in its ability to capture emanations of the psyche invisible to the naked eye. Engstrom’s work has a diaristic quality distantly reminiscent of the raw photojournals of the New York photographer Nan Goldin, but shot through with melancholic insinuations of spiritual yearning.

He also works in colour, although these pictures too flicker, like seismographs of emotion, with the visual interference formed by scratches or imperfect exposure. He has a habit of photographing his subjects through windows, so that they merge, collage-like, with reflections of trees or buildings. They are captured, held for this moment by the camera, but so too is the implication of their imminent disappearance, back into the wider world. This duality is reflected in the contrast between a number of close-cropped portraits that present the face of a friend, as if pushed up against the very glass of the lens, and a series of photographs of empty, unmade beds in hotel rooms.

Jorg Sasse is altogether cooler and more conceptually minded. He originally studied at the Dusseldorf Akademie under the tutelage of the ascetic and taxonomically inclined husband-and-wife team of photographers, Bern and Hilda Becher – one of whose more arduous projects involved photographing hundreds of European water towers, furnishing a kind of visual encyclopedia of the variations in design of a mundane functional object. His own sensibility is more playful and erratic than that of his erstwhile teachers, but he retains their stance of disengagement. Whether he should properly be termed a photographer is itself a moot point, given that all of the work for which he has been nominated takes the form of manipulated found photographs. Sasse’s method has involved building up a vast archive of anonymous, pre-existing pictures, which he transforms into digital data and then alters on a computer.

He prefers images that do not easily disclose their origins or intentions, that have a rootless, mysterious feel to them: a picture of an empty road suspension bridge, its sunlit tarmac criss-crossed by the latticework shadows of steel girders; a snapshot of some football players glimpsed, at a distance, through a section of goal netting, playing on what seems to be field of parched dust; a shot of American traffic, circa 1970, pouring towards a bridge flanked on both sides by gargantuan sections of unfinished elevated freeway – roads leading to nowhere.

Many of the pictures that he chooses look like metaphors for a sense of disconnection, or alienation, but presented with cold impassivity. Elsewhere Sasse cultivates a mood of sabotaged utopianism, heightening a picture of some remote island, set in an emerald ocean, to such an extent that the colours seem sickly. Maybe this is meant to imply the cloying contrivance of travel-agency escapist fantasies. Setting things subtly awry is certainly his favoured tactic. The strongest and oddest of the pictures in his display – none of which, incidentally, has a title, only a randomly generated four-digit number to identify it – is also one of the simplest. It shows a fragment of transparent plastic laid over a wire mesh, through which jungle foliage may be discerned. There is a small rent in the fabric, like an open wound in artificial flesh – Sasse’s characteristically dark way of suggesting that things always have a way of getting out of control.

Stephen Shore is easier to place, in that his pictures of America are evidently part of a tradition of road-trip art, photography and literature that has its antecedents in the writing of Jack Kerouac, the painting of Edward Hopper and the photographic work of Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand and numerous others. He has been nominated for a new and more complete version of a book of photographs originally published in 1982, entitled Uncommon Places. The pictures, inevitably, have the feel of period pieces, preserving as they do the look of various American cityscapes and roadside scenes from more than 20 years ago.

Some of them look predictable, in their focus on road signage and cars travelling nowhere in particular – essays in a species of American alienation that had already become a cliché by the time Hopper reached the later stages of his career. But others look wonderfully fresh. Early in life, Shore spent a lot of time in Andy Warhol’s factory, and he shares something of Warhol’s interest in the distinctive textures of American life. Shore’s first book was called American Surfaces and several of the pictures on display clearly continue that interest. He dwells on a gleaming white fridge, as imposing as a sarcophagus, in a ramshackle kitchen in a house somewhere in New Mexico. He pictures a breakfast table in Utah, set with tumbler of milk, a glass of iced water, half a honeydew melon and a plate stacked with pancakes, framing the shot carefully to capture the fake woodgrain veneer of the table and the red plasticated seat of the stool pulled up to it (he must have had to stand on a chair to take picture). Interspersed with these deadpan, eloquent studies of the look and feel of America are a number of beautifully tender depictions of Shore’s wife, a human being herself woven into the fabric of a particular time and place. He shows her in a red check shirt against a wall of crazily paved tiles of violent orange. He shows her at the bottom of a flight of pool steps, her body pale against the blue water, framed by stainless steel handrails – an American nymph alone in a watery American arcadia.

Last but not least, Luc Delahaye’s panoramic photographs are displayed in the second of the Photographers’ Gallery’s exhibition spaces, the walls of its café. Delahaye’s pictures amount to an extraordinary reinvention – or revision – of the contemporary news photograph. His subjects are those usually shot on 35 millimetre film by cameramen who have to travel light because of surrounding danger. But Delahaye takes pictures of things like the bombed-out Jenin Refugee Camp, with Israeli helicopter gunships sinister specks on the horizon, with a large format camera, almost as if he were Amselm Adams phootgraphing the Rocky Mountains. The results are stunningly monumental, eloquently framed shots of unfolding war and atrocity – the news photograph elevated to the level of the history painting. Delahaye’s pictures seem fraught with edgy intelligence and an ironic sense of history’s symmetries. His photograph of a street in Baghdad, palled by the smoke of war, descending in clouds from above a cropped row of high rise buildings, manages to evoke the many pictures of New York in the aftermath of 9/11 – pedestrians wandering through the wreckage of a no longer familiar city.

Delahaye is interested in the quieter revolutions of power as well as in their effects on the world at large, so there are photographs here of St Peter’s thronged with cardinals for the occasion of an ordinary Public Consistory, as well as a truly extraordinary photograph of Slobodan Milosevic, surrounded by transcribers and jurists in the oddly antiseptic space of a Brussels courtroom – a picture that looks for all the world as if the only person who could possibly have taken it was one of Milosevic’s judges. Nearby, an equally extraordinary photograph of a mass burial in Rwanda, graveside thronged by mourners, furnishes a panorama of dignified grief. Taken together, these are brilliant and extraordinary pictures, unlike anything that has ever, quite, been done before. Delahaye would be a deserving winner.