Re-photo

I arrived at Baker St a little early for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize (DBPP) exhibition opening last night – held for this year only at at Ambika P3, in an area that looks like a disused engineering lab in the basement of the University of Westminster – while the Photographers Gallery is rebuilt.  It remains on show until 1 May 2011 and the award will be announced on Tuesday 26 April 2011. After the London showing it will go to Berlin and Frankfurt.

So rather than hang around outside, I took a little walk around the area. Paddington St was where I first took a portfolio of prints to show a gallery owner many years ago. He spent perhaps half an hour looking through the small pile of work I had taken, enthusing about some of the pictures, looking through it again and again, before finally saying to me that he would love to show it, but it wouldn’t sell and he simply could not afford it. And in Chiltern Street I could look in the windows of the various closed galleries and shops, including the Atlas Gallery, showing the work of Herbert Ponting (although its web site doesn’t appear to mention this at the moment.)

But in general it’s a street full of what I regard as totally inessential shops, but also one which curiously seemed almost identical to most of the work on display for the DBPP when I finally arrived there. In what I think was an upmarket florists there was an impressive paper sculpture which came back to my mind when looking at the single over-large photograph of his work by paper sculptor Thomas Demand in the show, while many of the windows included advertising imagery that reminded me of the work of Roe Ethridge and Elad Lassry, although it was perhaps on average somewhat slicker.

Despite most of the rather empty wall space (and some empty of ideas even if there were pictures on it), the opening was an enjoyable evening, meeting a number of old friends and talking about many things, while drinking a few glasses of white wine. But there was really very little of photographic interest. If I felt for a moment that this represented the work that had “made the most significant contribution to photography in Europe, between 1 October 2009 and 30 September 2010” I would sell the cameras and take up fretwork.

It was very noticeable on the night that the only work that attracted any real interest on the wall from the large crowd was that by Jim Goldberg. His is the only photography of any significance in the show, although I think his approach in ‘Open See’ often defeats the object of his enterprise, making him more a scrapbook compiler than a photographer. As I’ve written before it is work that is very much better in the book Open See than on the exhibition wall. I was disappointed that some of what I feel are the best images from the 147 on the Magnum site from this long-term project which

“follows refugee and immigrant populations traveling from war-torn, economically devastated and often AIDS-ravaged countries to make new homes in Europe. Goldberg spent four years documenting the stories of Greek refugees from Iraq, Somalia, Congo, Ukraine, Albania, Russia, Ethiopia, Egypt, Bangladesh, Pakistan, China, Sudan, Kenya, Kurdistan, Afghanistan, Bulgaria, Palestine and Moldavia.”

His is the only photography of any significance in the show, and certainly the only project which would be worth supporting with the £30,000 prize money. But prizes such as this are always awarded more on grounds of fashion and art politics rather than merit. They create public interest in the medium while at the same time degrading it, and do nothing to stimulate really new creative work – for which the money would be much better spent on perhaps 5 or 10 smaller bursaries for emerging photographers or new projects.

Demand, as  I’ve said and he has said, isn’t a photographer, but a sculptor who makes sculptural constructions to be preserved as photographs, with the sculpture then being destroyed.

As I also noted in Deutsche Börse Ditto when the short list was announced,

It would indeed be good to have a major prize for photography in the UK, and to have a major gallery that supports photography as well as eating a large portion of the public photography budget.

This comment that came even more firmly to my mind as I stood looking at this show and thinking of the tragically misguided decision of Arts Council England to cut funding to Side. If you’ve not signed the petition yet, please do.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 5th, 2011 at 11:05 am and is filed under Photo Issues, Photographers, Reviews etc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.