Photo Philippe Chancel, from the series DPRK (2005). Courtesy the artist and Eric Franck Fine Art
Sara Allen enjoys the work of the four finalists in this year's Deutsche Börse Photography Prize.
The stunning work of the four finalists in the annual Deutsche Börse Photography Prize is showing at the Photographers' Gallery in London until April 9 2007. The winner will be announced, and the £30,000 prize awarded, on March 21 2007.
The shortlisted photographers are: Philippe Chancel; Anders Peterson; Walid Raad/The Atlas Group; and Fiona Tan.
All four are united by an interest in the tension between the camera as an instrument to objectively record, and the photograph as a fragile and personal component in a story.
Each artist fuses personal and political concerns in their work: cultural identity is the overriding theme of the exhibition.
Philippe Chancel received his nomination for the work DPRK which he photographed in North Korea in 2005. The series of 12 prints offer a rare insight into this closed state and focus on what the artist calls “distinctive signs of power” (read: deep narcissism) using his style of simple and neutral images.
Continuing Chancel’s 20 year focus on the intersection of art and photojournalism, the bold and glossy pictures offer a remote Technicolour window into a deeply politicised culture. The immediate polish of the images, though, has counterpoint in the detail – the repetition and uniformity within such a very ‘aesthetic’ ideology – which makes for challenging viewing.
In contrast to that initial sheen, Anders Petersen’s About Gap and St Etienne seems grotesque and raw. This myriad of small black and white photographs documents the socially invisible in southern France.
The resulting pictures are almost repellently intimate and challenge the viewer to find beauty within the decay. Every picture, amidst the ephemera associated with the fringes of culture, depicts tenderness.
Fiona Tan, who received her nomination for her exhibition Mirror Maker, calls herself a ‘professional foreigner’. And it is clear that concerns with identity and place inform her work. The Changeling is a video installation of 1920s portraits of Japanese schoolgirls in rotation. These nameless faces fade into one another and ask the viewer to consider the notion of portraiture.
In contrast, Vox Populi is a photographic installation made up of the photo albums of over 100 Norwegian families, all identically framed and hung by the artist. Though using found images is no longer daringly original, the impact of the pictures cannot be denied. The images tell a story at once personal and private (yet startlingly uniform). Close attention reveals humour and joy in the moments documented by each family which are inevitably echoed in the viewers’ photo albums at home.
Yet the artist cleverly draws attention to the pathos therein – the numerous sunsets, each subtly different and yet insistently repetitive, might initially hint at the banal predictability of human existence. But they also highlight the human desire to seek out the romantic or beautiful. In the end this is a reassuring work which testifies to the want to document, and to the centrality of the camera to these 20th and 21st century lives.
This concern with the photograph as archive is explicitly confronted by Walid Raad/The Atlas Group. Born in Lebanon, the artist has explored the region’s recent history in this project. Raad formed The Atlas Group in the early 1990s to author the ‘documents’ he produces and ascribes to various fictive characters.
The vast blurry ‘We decided to let them say…” appears to show grainy shots of people watching a bombing raid, ostensibly taken by the 15-year-old Raad, and recently revisited by the artist. The greying (and incidentally, beautiful) images have no details which allow the viewer to ‘authenticate’ Raad’s claims for their attribution. But that is exactly the point. They question the idea of authenticity or accuracy, versus personal memory or fantasy in historical records.
Above, from the series We decided to let them say, "we are convinced," twice (2002). Courtesy the artist and Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London
This exhibition neatly summarises contemporary photographic preoccupations. It highlights how current political questions concerning both cultural identity and writing history can be debated in the arts. And this is reason enough not to miss these provocative works.
But it would be wrong to overlook the nascent beauty of the images too – this is an exhibition which is a pleasure to view and absorb. Though it is the persuasively unsettling questions of identity which will haunt the viewer all the way home, and, I suspect, for some time after.
