Digging for what lies beneath
Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2017
Looking round at the work of the four photographers shortlisted for this year’s £30,000 Deutsche Börse Prize, the first impression is of a rather chilly emotional detachment. The Deutsche Börse celebrates “innovative and original photographic practice from across the world”, and on this showing you’d be forgiven for thinking that must now preclude oldschool photographic virtues such as humanity and emotional engagement.
In fact, these qualities are present. It just takes a bit of digging beneath the cool, technically immaculate surfaces to get to them.
Dutch photographer Dana Lixenberg’s physically sumptuous, large-format black-and-white portraits of the inhabitants of Imperial Courts, a gang crime-ridden area of Los Angeles, radiate a disconcerting mixture of intensity and impassivity. Several of these physically impressive young men and women have been murdered – in some cases by each other – over the 22 years Lixenberg has been working in the area, but the abiding mood is of fatalistic acceptance of a brutal order that is beyond the reach of liberal intervention.
Best known as a conceptual artist who plays with narrative, France’s Sophie Calle presents large wall texts concerning the deaths of her parents with rather nonplussing images. The texts are certainly revealing: on learning that her father has become seriously ill, she has a heart attack herself and wonders if this represents a desire to accompany him to the grave or simply an excuse not to see him.
But the mystifying accompanying picture of a curly-horned sheep – which could have been lifted straight from Google Images – hardly arouses the same pathos. Whether found or self-taken, Calle’s images have a studied banality that may suit the numbing nature of the subject, but will hardly excite the visitor.
Swiss artists Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs present a kind of postmodern take on the 19th-century anthropological expedition. Filmed close-ups of people encountered on travels in Central Asia reference the now discredited notion of the “ethnic type”, while photographing ancient artefacts from Berlin’s Museum of Ethnology against backdrops of their own photographs recalls the tradition of the diorama – a Victorian precursor of the cinema. If their images are often stunningly beautiful, their witty play with modes of photographic perception could have been taken a lot further.
Awoiska van der Molen, another Dutch photographer, takes the kind of technically irreproachable landscape photographs that can leave the lay viewer cold. With so many extraordinary things happening in the world, who cares if her leaves are in focus from half a mile away?
In fact van der Molen’s images are a lot more engrossing than they may initially appear. Spending weeks alone in wild regions that deliberately aren’t identified (though most look like the Rockies), her aim is to identify with the landscape to the extent she becomes physically part of it.
With epic contrasts in light and scale captured in truly painterly terms in images up to 8ft high, her work evokes American frontier photographers such as Ansel Adams, but with a far more immersive sense of personal involvement.
To my mind, it’s between the two Dutch women, and if pushed I might just plump for van der Molen.