Deutsche Borse Photography Prize 2013

I went to see the shortlist for this prize last week at the Photographer's Gallery. I was then pleased to see that OCA will be doing a study trip to see these shortlisted works in June which I shall aim to join since I felt the shortlist such that I'd like to revisit it and discuss the entries with other students.

There are four candidates for the prize and their appearance on the shortlist immediately triggers the thought - what constitutes contemporary photography ? Three candidates  are artists who use photography as part of their work; one, Chris Killip  is a documentary photographer  with a body of work stretching back over a number of decades.

Chris Killip

Black and white images of working class life produced in the north of England in the 1980s. Killip is being nominated for his show at Le Bal in Paris which he called 'What Happened/ Great Britain 1970 -90 . This body of work proposed to show the Thatcher years through the eyes of a camera lens. Reading a little about Killip in the exhibition's catalogue indicates that he very much sees himself as an artist. Where other social documentary photographers of the 70s were concerned the photography was used to drive forward the politics but in Gerry Badger's piece in the catalogue for Killip, 'the photography was an end in itself, although not exclusively so.
I really appreciated these photographs for their composition and strong emotional driving force. Black and white photography is not an area of photography that  I have explored as a photographer but  looking at these images really whets the appetite for Part three of this course.


Christina De Middel   'The Afronauts and other works'

This is an imaginative  reconstruction  of the 1960s Zambian space programme comprising photographs, drawings and re-photographed letters originally presented in a self published book but in this case displayed over a number of walls in the gallery. I really enjoyed this work on an initial superficial level. Having looked at the catalogue now and read the articles below, I want to go back and take a second longer look to try to understand what it is that strikes a chord here with me.


Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin  'War Primer II'

This is a re-examination of Bertolt Brecht's War Primer ( 1955) which repositions it within a contemporary dialogue about war and its representation. The original photographic images are overlaid with more recent photographs from later arenas of war such as Iraq and Afghanistan. It was published as a book and what we see here are pages from the book which presents very powerful juxtapositioned images  on a small scale..


Mishka Henner

Photographs taken from Google Street View which explore the subject of sex workers in urban and rural environments. Having have seen other work taken from Google street View by such as Michael Wolff, I have to admit that I found this  piece of work uninspiring ( uninspiring from the point of view of composition and emotional  standpoint rather than the questions they trigger ) do not make contact with me  emotionally or intellectually ...I found myself at the end of the piece of work rather distanced from the work rather than engaged with what Henner was portraying or asking of his audience.

I was also interested to read the four articles listed on the OCA website which show how opinions can be polarised.

Adrian Searle in The Guardian :   http://goo.g/Xz4TH

Searle believes Killip should win.

Brad Feuerhelm  1000 words :  http://goo.gl/mYY0V

Feuerhelm favours  War Primer 2 and Afronauts

Richard Dorment in The Telegraph :  http://goo.gl/KtMgL

Dorment feels War Primer II deserves recognition.

Sean O'Hagan in The Guardian :  http://goo.gl/XWBzD

O'Hagan favours War Primer II as well!

I shall come back to this posting at a later stage to add further reflections after a re visit to the exhibition and some followup reading as i think he does highlight a key debate..