The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, one of the most reputable and influential prizes in the photography field, is now held in the Photographer’s Gallery with the works of four artists, Deana Lawson, Gilles Peress, Jo Ractliffe and Anastasia Samoylova. Since being set up in 1996, this prize has been annually awarded to a living artist who has made an extraordinary contribution to the medium of photography in Europe in the previous year, either through an exhibition or publication.[1] Numerous prominent artists have won the title, such as Andreas Gursky, Boris Mikhailov, Paul Graham, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, etc. Due to its prestigious status, both the winner and the finalists of each year are highly notable.
The exhibition starts with Anastasia Samoylova’s work, FloodZone, on the fifth floor. Being exhibited in a space with dark-color background, the vivid color of the photos presents strong contrasts and captures the audience's attention as her work does. After living in Florida for five years, the contradiction between the threat of climate change and the dreamlike imagery from the advertisement evolves into a series of revealing the crack of the mask.
The shining water reflection in the flooded basement, a row of uprooted palm trees leaning perilously against the buildings, colorful real-estate and tourist advertisements, swinging among idealized imagination and the reality of the occurring environmental crisis brings out the stark dissonance happening in Florida at this moment.
In the room next door, Jo Ractliffe’s monochrome photos documenting the social and political landscape of South Africa over 40 years are presented in this bright and delicate space. This long-term and ongoing project captures the bizarre objects, the pieces from country life, and the vast and empty landscape view in South Africa and Angola. As she said, the landscape is a “medium” for her more than a “subject”. Through this “medium”, under her unique interpretation, this aggregation of disparate images produces an unorthodox atmosphere fulfilling in the room; meanwhile, the thought-proving meaning emerges from it. Instead of using violent, dramatic, suffering documentary photos, Ractliffe invites viewers to sort out the implication of these expressive and poetic images.
Coming to the fourth floor, the massive scale works with shining silver framing come to people’s sight at first glance. Project Centropy from Deana Lawson is a complex collection of portraits, family snapshots, and holograms, trying to reframe and reassert a Black experience. An even deeper appeal is vested in an ordinary, natural portrait through the scale and the full details.
In the last part of the exhibition, the project of Gill Press, Whatever You Say, Say Nothing, takes over the whole space. Numerous amounts of black and white photos being enlarged and arranged ordinarily on the wall, as well as expanded photobooks on the shelf, make visitors feel like being in the middle of an archive room surrounded by countless images. However, this work is a “documentary fiction” composed of photographs documenting the British Army’s massacre of Irish civilians on Bloody Sunday and its aftermath after 8 years it happened. Through interweaving with the seemingly peaceful daily life and the intensity of the bloody conflict, an inexpressible and ambiguous inharmony looms out of the silence.
[1] https://www.deutscheboersephotographyfoundation.org/en/support/photography-prize.php