The Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2015

Annual exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery for this prize which rewards a living photographer for a specific body of work in an exhibition or publication. The exhibition showed the work of the four artists on the shortlist.

I was very moved by the work of Zanele Muholi who had produced a series of portraits, collated into a book, of gay people in South Africa, looked in particular at the impact of homophobia and violence including the ‘curative rape’ of black gay women. The exhibition had a wall of these photographs which were striking showed them alongside the book and an art work which had invited people from London to transcribe some of the stories in the book onto a banner.

I also liked the work of Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse which looked at a high rise block in Johannesburg which had been built of the aspirational middle classes in the 1970s but had become and dilapidated refuge for the urban poor and was now being demolished. They had produced tall light boxes of of pictures of all the doors of the block and of the views from the windows and the television and what they were showing. They also took photos of the interiors shortly before demolition and transposed perfectly onto the space family photos of people who had lived in the block.

I was not so taken with the other two artists. I liked Nikolai Bakahrev’s work but it seemed to be a re-curation of previously done work so  it didn’t feel so fresh and contemporary. There was also work by Vivian Sassen which had a much more artistic quality but I wasn’t too sure what it was trying to say.

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