arts and design

Deutsche Börse photography prize review – big ideas but the wrong place for them

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‘The limits of photography cannot yet be predicted,” wrote the German philosopher, Walter Benjamin, in 1928, when the form was new and its potential uncertain. One wonders what Benjamin would have made of the ways in which contemporary practitioners are testing and sometimes, intentionally or otherwise, illuminating the limits of the medium. This year’s Deutsche Börse prize exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, is a case in point. It is big on ideas, ambition and creative process, but, for me, oddly underwhelming.

The most resonant work is the one most haunted by the ghosts of history. Anton Kusters’ The Blue Skies Project is a study in stillness: a flat grid of 1,078 Polaroid images, each subtly different, their apparent ordinariness at odds with their immense symbolism. Over several years, Kusters photographed a small patch of blue sky above the site of every known second world war concentration camp in Europe. Each Polaroid is stamped with a row of numerals that correspond to the GPS coordinates of a camp and the number of people who perished there.

Haunted by the ghosts of history ... a grid representing the Auschwitz concentration camp from The Blue Skies Project.



Haunted by the ghosts of history … a grid representing the Auschwitz concentration camp from The Blue Skies Project. Photograph: Anton Kusters

I previously described the piece as “deeply meditative”, but now I am not sure. The formalism of the arrangement and the relative sameness of each image, alongside the subtle lighting and the long-form ambient soundscape by Ruben Samama, is certainly calming, but that is not quite the same thing.

The painstaking research that went into the creation of the installation is, in itself, a profound act of memory. Likewise, the soundscape, which spans the years that the death camps were active, each subterranean bleep you hear representing a death. The Polaroids, though, for all their quietness and temporal fragility, made me wonder about the limits of photography that the ever-prescient Benjamin instinctively sensed. They are, says Ulrich Baer in his catalogue essay, “an archive of the unseen”. Maybe so, but for that very reason, they seem almost weightless, their impact curiously muted. This could be to do with the context. The installation was previously exhibited in the solemn setting of the nearby Fitzrovia Chapel; one wonders how much its resonance has been altered, even diminished, by its inclusion in a group show in a traditional gallery setting.

For the activist-artist, Mohamed Bourouissa, whose work possesses an edgy contemporary resonance, the problem is a practical one. Of the four contenders, he suffers the most from the venue’s lack of space.

Bourouissa has been nominated for his sprawling multimedia installation, Free Trade, a highlight of Les Rencontres d’Arles last summer. There, it occupied an entire top floor of a vast Monoprix supermarket, his use of surveillance cameras, 3D sculptures, footage shot on stolen mobile phones and grainy security shots of shoplifters an almost overwhelming evocation of contemporary global capitalism and its alienating effect on the marginalised youth of Parisian suburbs. Here, it is condensed into one half of a relatively modest gallery space and loses some of the freeform overload that made it such a viscerally immersive experience.

Mohamed Bourouissa’s La République, 2006.



Contemporary resonance … Mohamed Bourouissa’s La République, 2006. Photograph: Mohamed Bourouissa, Kamel Mennour, Paris & London and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles

Curator Anna Dannemann has worked hard to reconfigure the installation – visitors can conjure up a spectral Army of the Unemployed via an app as they negotiate the space – but the reduced scale means visitors only experience a fraction of its full force.

The work of the other two contenders, though radically different in style, seems more suited to the small gallery setting. Mark Neville began shooting portraits of the residents of Guingamp, Brittany, in 2016 on the day that the UK voted to leave the EU. The region’s historical links to Britain date back to the various flows of immigration between the third and sixth centuries. As Neville’s photographs show, there is still something oddly British about the place and its people, whether in the traditional velvet waistcoats of the local hunters or the glimpse of a codified class system that separates the workers engaged in industrial-scale food production from the landed gentry.

Recreating an analogue experiment ... Information Source #3 (2017 - 2018) for Clare Strand’s The Discrete Channel with Noise.



Recreating an analogue experiment … Information Source #3 (2017 – 2018) for Clare Strand’s The Discrete Channel with Noise. Photograph: Clare Strand

If Neville’s engagement with the local community amounts to a kind of sustained creative collaboration, the complexity of his undertaking also depends to a crucial degree on the information contained in a free booklet produced for the exhibition. In it, locals describe their jobs and articulate their concerns about the future of localism in an increasingly globalised world. Its subtext, though, is that images alone cannot convey the full intricacy of the region and its people.

Clare Strand has made her name by grappling in her slightly madcap way with the limits of photography. Her installation The Discrete Channel with Noise revisits a pioneering 1930s attempt to telegraphically transmit images. Using black and white photographs from her personal collection, she recreated the analogue experiment, using smartphone technology. Her husband applied a numbered grid to each image, with each number denoting a tone of grey between black and white. He then transmitted the coded information to her over the telephone from the UK to Paris. Strand then used the same grid to make large-scale paintings based on the information she received.

The original photographs, gridded in pencil, line one wall in the gallery, while the corresponding lego-like monochrome paintings loom large on two adjacent walls. A long row of much-used paintbrushes and encrusted tubs of paint are arranged in a vitrine as evidence of the hands-on labour involved in making the work. In an information age defined by the tyranny of the algorithm and the constant low-level anxiety induced by our often duplicitous information culture, it is an oddly relevant, if slightly bonkers, response. Benjamin, one suspects, would understand.

The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation prize-shortlisted artists are exhibited at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, from 21 February to 7 June. The winner of the 2020 prize will be announced on 14 May.

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