At the centre of Paris Photo, (PP), is a stand displaying a car. Given that BMW are an official Paris Photo partner and provide the BMW-Paris Photo prize, I imagine it was probably a BMW, but it looked pretty boring to me.
Personally I’d like to see ban on cars in cities. For London we could use the M25 as a giant car park (it sometimes gets like that) and set up decent public transport within it. Perhaps this might even include some electric taxis and electric self-drive vehicles – perhaps at ranks like those bikes in Paris for London Oyster card users, though I think I’d favour extensive light rail links to some more central locations.
I sold the first and only car I owned in 1966, though I have occasionally hired one in the years since then. Despite what manufacturers like BMW would like us to think, there is no such thing as a ‘green’ car – running on hydrogen or not. Green ‘vehicles’ are pedal powered.
I still ride the bike given me by my eldest brother (long dead) for my 13th birthday, though almost everything except the frame and handlebars have been replaced over the years. And one of my most useful photo accessories is a Brompton, a folding bike I can carry on trains and tubes. It gets you to locations without fuss or parking problems, and also is handy to lean against walls and stand on to look over them.
I’m definitely not a car person. Though I hardly think that’s why I found the entries to the 2007 BMW – Paris Photo Prize so disappointing. The competition is limited to works by living art photographers entered by the galleries taking part in PP, and apparently 60 works were submitted from the over 80 galleries.
The 16 short-listed works were on show in a spacious gallery area on a large doughnut-shaped dais at the centre of PP, and I found the selection as a whole depressingly poor. The 2007 theme was “Water, the Origin of Life” and even works by photographers I usually admire seemed to lack inspiration. Indeed, for several of them, “pedestrian” was the word that came into my mind for their interpretation of the theme.
The jury included Jacqueline d’Amecourt, curator of the Lhoist Collection based in Brussels, Vince Aletti, photography critic of the New Yorker magazine, Charlotte Cotton, now in charge of photography at LACMA in Los Angeles, Roberta Valtorta, director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Cinisello Balsamo, Milan, photographer Massimo Vitali and two guys from BMW. They didn’t come to the same conclusion as me, but at least they avoided choosing of the more boring works.
Jitka Hanzlová, Untitled (Hungry fishes) from the series the cotton rose , 2004, Kicken (Berlin)
Czech photographer Jitka Hanzlová (b 1958) who lives in Germany was the winner of the 12,000 Euro prize. Her image wasn’t my first choice, but it was certainly one of the better entries.
