The Deutsche Börse Photography Prize rewards a living photographer, of any nationality, for a specific body of work which has ‘significantly contributed to photography in Europe’ during the past 12 months. After a stellar outing in 2013, this, the seventeenth year of the £30,000 award, feels slightly more lightweight in comparison.
No battle is really waged to show photography’s expansion, save for one artist: Richard Mosse. He is in the running for his major multi-media installation, The Enclave, which represented Ireland at the 55th Venice Biennale. Shot in the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a warzone that has brought about the death of more than 5.4 million people since 1998, Mosse has photographed these appalling circumstances through the prism of the sublime. Using a large-format camera and discontinued military reconnaissance film (originally designed for camouflage detection, thus registering an invisible spectrum of infra-red light), the resultant images are rendered in bilious, psychedelic colour.
Much ado has been made of the aestheticisation of tragedy, particularly from the earnest photojournalism community. Yet Mosse’s artistic strategies survive any accusations of conceit and win new terrain by forcing deeper reflections on human catastrophe. In the process, Mosse interrogates the fallibility of documentary photography while squaring up to the urgent issues born out of the depiction of conflict. Devastating but mesmerisingly beautiful, his monumental prints command your attention and pull you into their atmosphere of unreality, making the pain and suffering of warfare easier to digest but its complexities no less difficult to comprehend.
Also showing in the basement of a nearby multi-storey car park is Mosse’s immersive multi-channel video installation, marking one of six solo exhibitions for the artist in 2014 alone. It certainly feels like Mosse’s moment, and given his sentience to the image-making epoch it’s easy to see why he’s this year’s favourite.
Receiving dues
Championed in the opposite corner of the same floor in The Photographers’ Gallery is a large volume of small, tightly grouped prints from the Brooklyn-born artist, Lorna Simpson. A pioneer of conceptual photography, she is finally receiving her dues and has been nominated for the long-awaited retrospective at Jeu de Paume, Paris, now currently on display at Baltic in Gateshead.
The series featured here, 1957/2009, takes a collection of found photographs as its starting point. An unknown subject, a black woman who we imagine might be vying for a career as a model or actress, is pictured posing and creating a persona for the camera in various locales across Los Angeles one summer in the late 1950s.
What compelled Simpson is that the archive seemed more of a documentation of the interaction with a camera. Re-presented with her own images, Simpson adroitly inserts black and white photographs of herself into the series, automatically entering the viewer into a game of discerning where she appears within her own works. More to the point, she eeks out a dialogue not only on gender, identity, memory and the body, but also between the past and present, creating a new being, ageless and whose charm and gestures live outside of time, and in different places at once.
Unflinching vision
Elsewhere, Alberto García-Alix, the eldest of the shortlisted artists, has been nominated for his monograph Autorretrato/Self-Portrait, published by Spain’s La Fabrica Editorial in 2013. If we were rewarding a career, the prize could well be García-Alix’s for the taking, since the book features over 40 years of his photographic output and provides great insight into his life’s work.
Since the 1970s he has photographed his social circle passing in front of the camera – though the main character in his imagery is of course García-Alix himself. At times staged, while others are more candid, the black and white self-portraits show fragments of a world of drugs, rock and roll, motorbikes, tattoos, and so on. Brimming with subjectivity, the magic of the encounter always starts from himself. The vision is raw and unflinching, but to an audience already overexposed to the work of his contemporaries, such as Antoine d’Agata, Nan Goldin or Larry Clark (to name some of the best known proponents of this diaristic mode), scenes of people shooting up have fast become clichéd tropes.
Still, within the context of the shortlist and the exhibition, the imagery provides an interesting counterbalance to the more placid, though no less noble, photography of Hamburg-based Jochen Lempert, with whom García-Alix shares a gallery floor.
Lempert is a biologist by profession who came to photography in the early 1990s. He has since developed a practice revolving around an ongoing exploration of human beings and the natural world, and by extension our attempts to understand and represent this relationship. Fragile photograms of baby frogs, constellations of freckles on a woman’s shoulder, swans bobbing on water, eyelashes during blinking and other phenomena are often highly contrasted, abstracted and ultimately linked through patterns of visual alliteration. Last year’s show at Hambruger Kunsthalle in his native Germany is what merited inclusion in the shortlist.
His anachronistic approach to photography – use of 35mm cameras, producing his own silver gelatin prints – combined with a perfectly appropriate lo-fi presentation – exhibiting images without frames and slightly curled up along the edges – is a delight, and subtly and effectively plays up to the notion of photograph as object. Yet, by the same token, his relative obscurity perhaps arises from the delicate, will-o’-the-wisp intimacy of his work. Sadly, it probably won’t put him in strong contention for the prize.
There can only be one winner – and that surely has to be Richard Mosse.
The Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2014 runs at The Photographers’ Gallery, London until 22 June. thephotographersgallery.org.uk
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PICTURED: Richard Mosse, The Enclave – Tim Clark opens our regular series on art books with a look at Mosse’s incredible work
