Mundane?
Anna Fox, Hampshire Village Play, 2003, from the series Back to the Village 1999 - © Anna Fox. Courtesy James Hyman Gallery, London
The Photographers’ Gallery annual Deutsche Börse Photography Prize rewards a living photographer, of any nationality, who has made the most significant contribution, in exhibition or publication format, to the medium of photography over the previous year. This is a fascinating challenge for the judges. Judging what is a significant contribution to something easily compared is clearly difficult enough, but photography is so heterogeneous that it appears almost an impossible task.
Looking at this year’s shortlisted candidates Anna Fox and Zoe Leonard could be described as documenting their intimate or proximate spaces. Anna Fox’s work is quiet and the political content emerges as you contemplate what on a fleeting glance could pass for the mundane. For me the power is in the ability the work has to grab you when your guard is down. The photo series My Mother’s Cupboard and My Father’s Words (1999) has a searing power to shock.
The work of Donovan Wylie and Sophie Ristelhueber is both monumental in scale and immediately challenging. Wylie’s images of the Maze prison cannot fail to stir emotions for anyone who can remember the daily news reports from the seventies and eighties, and some of Ristelhueber’s images appear straight from today’s news.
Sophie Ristelhueber, Eleven Blowups #10, 2006 © Sophie Ristelhueber/adagp
In fact, things are now what they seem, Ristelheuber’s interest in conflict and it’s aftermath is not simple reportage, but rather a metaphotographic project. The blast images are not factual reports but carefully constructed images of what could be, and what evidently is in some locations other than these. By deliberately breaking the news editors’ rule on manipulation she abstracts from the ‘look at what happened here’ to the ‘look what we are doing’.
So how does one choose who should win? Fortunately I don’t have too try, but I do have a preference. In their steely understated concentration on the strangeness of the everyday I feel Anna Fox holds a mirror up to our lives and reveals disturbing and joyful truths.
Wonderfully well put. This is a show worth seeing. It will be interesting to see who gets the prize (and the dough too)!
Sophie Ristelhueber (b.1949, France) has been awarded the 2010 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. At a special ceremony on Wednesday 17 March 2010, the film director Terry Gilliam presented the £30,000 award.