Contemporary Culture and Global Responsibility
Emilie Trice
The Deutsche Börse Photography Prize was announced this past March at the Photographer’s Gallery in London, awarding Robert Adams the prize of 30,000 pounds (roughly $52,600.00), which his representative, longtime friend Gerry Badger, promptly donated to a human rights organization. The Börse Prize affords both its winners and nominees the prestige granted with admission to an exclusive group of contemporary photography’s best, among them Joel Sternfeld, Juergen Teller, Rineke Dijkstra and Andreas Gursky, all previous winners. The Prize began as the Citygroup Photography Prize in 1996, but with the additional sponsorship of the Deutsche Börse Group, the prize has become more lucrative and for the first time, expanded to include nominations for exhibitions from the entire European continent. Competition is thus pretty stiff to say the least.
This year’s nominees are all well-established artists; however, the honor of Börse inclusion equally confirms each photographer’s elite status in the art world. Phil Collins (UK), Alec Soth (USA) and Yto Barrada (Morocco) were all short-listed and each contributed a unique facet to the prize’s exhibition at the Photographer’s Gallery. Soth’s series, "Sleeping by the Mississippi" offers a romantic yet solemn vision of unscripted Americana in saturated colors. Soth traveled down the Mississippi for five years, investigating the America so often seen and yet overlooked. His human subjects were all questioned before sitting as to their dream and their answers informed Soth’s portrayal of them and ultimately the tone of the entire series. Abandoned beds, religious undertones and eccentric characters are all leitmotifs in Soth’s series, offering insight into personal versions of the cliqued American dream, subtle successes, humble desires and ordinary pleasures that are often overshadowed by the all-mighty capitalistic interpretation, but reflect a more authentic American identity.
The desolate environments in Robert Adam’s series "Turning Back, A Photographic Journal of Re-exploration," were shot between 1999 and 2003 and present beautifully documented evidence of the damage done to the American wilderness by industrial development, a victim of modern progress. Inspired by Lewis and Clark’s initial expedition over the same, yet drastically different, terrain 200 years ago, Adams’s work is currently relevant and political, while reflecting the tradition of landscape photography, thereby blurring two distinctive boundaries.
Yto Barrada’s photography also carries a geographic and political message, but focuses on immigration and diaspora. "A Life Full of Holes — the Strait Project" confronts both the myths and realities that encompass illegal immigration, specifically across the Strait of Gibraltar. Barrada has lived and worked in both Paris and Tangier, drawing conclusions about the assumptions each society holds for the other and incorporating these ideas into her work aesthetically and conceptually. She straddles two opposing cultures and holds a mirror up to both simultaneously, reflecting both sides’ misperceptions and inherent truths.
Phil Collins also depicts elements of current culture, dealing with pop culture and its mistaken frivolity as well as more serious issues of politics, two subjects that he shows to be, at times, mutually inclusive. He earned the nomination for his show "Yeah…You, Baby You", although his portion of the Börse exhibition was devoted not to his photography, but to a video from which he selected stills as photographs. The video, El Mundo No Escuchará (The World Won’t Listen), testifies to Collins’s ability to capture comedic irony, despite undercurrents of actual political duress.
This work also illustrates the significance of global pop culture’s shared soundtrack as a universal language. El Mundo No Escuchará showcases a karaoke festival in Bogota, Columbia, that Collins filmed over the course of ten weeks. Set before ironic backdrops of fantastical natural beauty (palm trees, sunsets, mountain ranges and lakes), local musicians exhibit their allegiance to the Smiths and above all, Morissey’s depraved brilliance, by singing an entire album with reckless emotional abandon, unintentionally humorous performances and commendable English accents. Their devotion to the band and the music unites them and a global community of Smiths fans. The music itself offers comfort from the political battlefield that, if dropped, the artificially beautiful karaoke curtain would reveal.
These artists’ contributions were all worthy of the Börse honor, but Adams was definitely due for the prize, having been nominated previously and boasting a highly respected career of over four decades. His donation of reward to Human Rights Watch further supported his respectability and proved Adams’s devotion to his ideologies. In our global society, saturated daily with images, many of them meaningless, earning this nomination vindicates the significance of creating pictures and representing two-dimensionally the resounding metaphysical truth that surges beneath the surface, despite its being portrayed by that surface alone. Even if photography can only physically frame that which is already there, it signifies infinitely more and resonates with both depth and longevity the extent beyond its physical borders. Look for these four photographers to continue impacting contemporary culture and the way we view our world.
