© Jesse Alexander, 2007
Photographers’ Gallery, London
Published in HotShoe no.147
Now in its eleventh year, the Photographers’ Gallery continues to host the annual Photography Prize which rewards a living photographer of any nationality for their contribution to the medium over the last year.
French artist and photojournalist Philippe Chancel (b. 1959) was short-listed for his series DPRK (featured in HotShoe 145) which was exhibited at Arles last year. Chancel’s project confirms the squeaky-clean, propagandist image of North Korea. During Chancel’s three chaperoned trips to the country in 2005, he visited public memorials and museums, schools and universities, hotels, and the classic mass displays of totalitarian regimes. Well aware that his access to photograph would be severely restrained, Chancel never purported to give an objective impression of the country: anywhere outside of Pyongyang does not exist in the work and there is no obvious attempt to show the “real life” stories of the people of North Korea. This almost prosaic working approach is accentuated by Chancel’s visual strategy, which employs a very linear, centred camera angle which reflects the structured nature of life in North Korea in general: the series is meant to be read as a day trip to utopia. The images are of course riddled with contradictions and irony, and made especially eerie by the omnipresence of icons depicting Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, constantly scrutinising their people. Chancel is one of very few photographers who have been allowed to photograph above the 38th Parallel, and this must be a reason why he has been short-listed for this year’s prize, however, the element of icon-worshipping has particular significance to a Western audience which is also addicted to the cult of personality.
In stark contrast to Chancel’s glistening colour photographs is Anders Petersen’s (b. 1944, Sweden) series About Gap and St. Etienne that was also at Arles. Over many years, Petersen has developed a brand of gritty, biographical, realism, which has an acquired taste, imitated most recently by Jacob Aue Sobol and Paul Kranzler. This series was made during a residency in these towns in the south of France in 2005. Petersen’s almost randomly scattered modestly-sized black and white prints across the gallery walls, mirror the chaos within his images. Figures, despite their actual emotions, appear contorted and in pain. Individuals pose naked or semi-dressed, sometimes looking bold and proud of their bodies and their scars, and sometimes recoiling away from the camera. Petersen’s aggressive yet carefully balanced mix of portraits, pictures of animals and vignettes of these people’s lives creates an austere and wretched environment that is anonymous of place and time, where man and beast are indistinguishable.
Fiona Tan’s (b.1966, Indonesia) installation contemplates the relationship between our lives and photography with considerably less angst. Presented here are two pieces Vox Populi (Sydney) and The Changeling, both of which are taken from the exhibition Mirror Maker that was shown at Landesgalerie in Linz, Austria, for which Tan has been nominated. Tan works with both video and photography and in particular with found and archival images. Vox Populi, which was made for the 2006 Sydney Biennale, consists of hundreds of small framed prints spread across two walls that were taken from family albums in Sydney. It is both an attempt to give a voice to domestic photography and to address the decline of the family album, which has been a side effect of the digital camera. The collection is loosely grouped (there are sunsets, days at the beach, special occasions, road-trips, the kids dressing-up) which fluidly merge with one-another. It isn’t necessary to get up close and inspect them – we know them all already – and whether or not one feels compelled to, or uncomfortable by delving into another’s family album is the biggest question for the viewer. The irony with this work is that digital photography has made sharing photos much easier and faster and therefore more habitual. Opposite these walls are two small screens, one with a static, standardised school portrait, and the other with two hundred different portraits of anonymous Japanese schoolgirls from the 1920s, which change every few seconds. This installation is accompanied by a voice-over soundtrack performed by Fiona Shaw, describing the life of one of these imaginary girls reflecting as an older woman, her mother and grandmother. The juxtaposition of these two works provides a contrast between the rigid institutional portraits and the informal family snapshots. This gives the viewer a rough guide to Tan’s oeuvre, although it is impossible to grasp the implications of the original exhibition Mirror Maker here, or indeed in the catalogue.
In keeping with the Photographers’ Gallery’s love affair with the archive is Walid Raad/The Atlas Group with The Atlas Group. The Atlas Group is the name given to the keepers of the archive, which collected various forms of personal and institutional documents of the Lebanese conflicts between 1989 and 2004. The archive, or at least a part of it was exhibited at the Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin last year. Presented here are two of Raad’s own contributions, both of which are inventive interpretations of conflict within a gallery space. The first is six huge back and white photographs, now riddled with scratches, fingerprints, and curious multicoloured blobs, taken from the relative safety of the hills surrounding Beirut in 1982. These are Raad’s testimony as a fifteen-year-old boy, awe-stuck at the Israeli fighter planes which are reduced in these pictures to little more than specs of dirt. One image, of a group of people looking out across the city could be mistaken for spectators at an air-show. There is also a sample of Raad’s diligently catalogued collection of bullets and shells. Where he found them is marked by self-adhesive coloured dots stuck on to black-and-white photographs; the different colours corresponding to the different ammunition brands, and hence, a record of all the twenty-three different countries that contributed arms to both sides of the conflict. These photographs (or perhaps collages) are intensely surreal, heightened by their naïve aesthetic.
Considering the judge’s decision to award the prize last year to Robert Adams for his lifetime achievement, it is likely that this year it will be given to Anders Petersen. However, in light of last year’s invasion of Lebanon, the magnificently surreal quality of The Atlas Group, and its function as an antidote to the discourse on presenting images of conflict taken by Western photographers for a Western audience in the gallery space, this is one archival project that is well worth crediting.