by The price of the German Stock Exchange Photography Foundation is back, with four artists, each nominated for a single exhibition or a book that was presented or published last year. It is a calm, solemn and laconic show that range from lyrical, fascinating portraits of black cowboys with versace-dressed, to a woman hugging stones.
The show begins with the least interesting work. Cristina de Middel, a former photo journalist and now President of Magnum, is nominated for the second time. Here a piece of your huge exhibition trip to the center in a spectacular church from the 15th century during the Arles Festival is restored last year. The installation tries to be dynamic – a bright orange wooden scaffold cuts through the middle of the room; Photos are placed in addition to inflated versions of Mexican Lotería cards-but it cannot cover up the mouth of de Middel’s work.
The journey to the center (the title from Jules Vernes adventure novel) tries to redesign the trips from Mexico migrants to California as a heroic quest. However, this happens through mainly inconspicuous landscape images that are sewn together in a non -convincing story. De Middel experienced a real danger when they took the pictures on them – dangers that all migrants are exposed to – but that is worked out. Does heroism exclude the need?
In one picture there is a portrait of a young, nameless migrant on the border on the beach in Tijuana and has a jumper with Donald Trump’s huge pout and prepares to enter a country with a “rest in Mexico” policy. It reads too much like a joke at the expense of the migrant. In further imagination, de Middel shows high-language athletes who train next to the Tortilla Wall, a particularly dangerous transition from Baja California to San Diego. De Middel sets off to reinvent the history of Mexican migration to the United States for Western viewers in this series, but the suffocating symbolism is too glib and brilliant to achieve this.
It gets better. In the next room, the Knockout works by the American photographer Rahim Fortune, a selection from his nominated hardtack book, are waiting for the wall as a magnificent black and white silver gelatin. Hardtack refers to the unleavened bread, which is used by buffalo soldiers as survival food and later adapted by black cowboys and livestock breeders. Fortune’s glorious documentary pictures bring us between the topographies and people in rural communities in the southern countries in which he grew up and where metaphors of survival and persistence are abundant.
Regardless of whether the houses from the Siedler era, whose history speaks through their urgent architecture, or a new father who keeps his child tenderly shimmer and scintillate. In a portrait of three lover dancers in Edna, Texas, there is grace and humility, the heads leaned and the arms that were pushed out in spiritual devotion. And a pearl mutual frame queen who all shine. In this delicate portrait of black life in the American south, the tattered facade of Sam’s BBQ in Austin faces what remains threatening in the American landscape, with the hand -painted shield: “We may have come to different ships, but we are now in the same boat.”
The Peruvian-American artist Tarrah Krajnak is the Wild Card this year, but brings laughing. In a series, Krajnak is playfully taken over pictures from Edward Weston’s 1977 Book of Nudes. There is a recovery of a picture of Model Charis Wilson from 1942 on a sofa that has a gas mask that she had issued as a volunteer for Aircraft Warning Service. Krajnak replicates the image, including the Farnwedel -Westwedel used, but switches on the composition and creates a diptych so that your body is cut into two parts. It is a pithy deconstruction that shows the cold of Weston’s view of female bodies in its sculptural, fragmented figures.
I wonder whether Krajnak was also inspired by Weston’s challenge, “photographing a rock, making it look like a rock, but be more than a rock” in your series Automatic Rocks/Excavations, in which she digs stones from her garden, calls them under control for a while and then picks up pictures of them. They are Bonkers, but it is insignificant fun.
Lindokuhle Sobekwa, the last artist of the show, would be a worthy winner for the £ 30,000 prize (which will be announced in May). Sobekwa’s gripping project, I take your photo with me, is reinterpreted in a slide show, with a beautiful musical score of Nduduzo Makhathini and a constellation of images that are distributed in fragments across the walls, corresponds to the rawness of the original spiral bound scades.
It is a journey of shocking loss. When Sobekwa was seven, his sister Ziyanda (then 13) followed him when he was hit by a car and seriously injured. Ziyanda then ran away and did not return home for almost a decade. She was finally lived in a hostel, but died shortly afterwards at the age of 22. She would not allow Sobekwa to take her photo, an absence that is great.
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In LO-FI pictures, he combs the foggy, dilapidated, disenfranchised landscapes of the South African community complex, in which he grew up, once as a bloody taxi bar. He sees an insight into the face of his late sister for other young women he hits in the hostel. Slowly the feeling of the family loss with the masses that have disappeared during (and since then) apartheid in the void of violence. Diary entries are scribbled and urgently pressed, the pencil pressed hard on the paper.
The pain of Sobekwa’s grief penetrates; In one picture he catches his shadow over her grave. His photos are often fatty, the weakening light fades like memories, the camera, which tries to clasp and repair the picture before it is gone forever.
• The price of the German Börse Photography Foundation 2025 is in the photographer gallery in London until June 15th
