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The Deutsche Börse photography foundation prize is back, with four shortlisted artists, each nominated for a solo exhibition or book presented or published in the last year. It’s a quiet, solemn and laconic show ranging from lyrical, captivating portraits of Versace-clad Black cowboys in the American south to a woman hugging rocks.
The show begins with the least interesting work. Cristina de Middel, a former photojournalist and now president of Magnum, is nominated for the second time. Here, a slice of her vast exhibition Journey to the Center, staged in a spectacular 15th-century church during the Arles festival last year, is re-created. The installation tries to be dynamic – a bright orange wooden framework cuts through the middle of the space; photographs are placed next to blown-up versions of Mexican Lotería cards – but it can’t cover up the blandness of De Middel’s work.
Journey to the Center (the title cribbed from Jules Verne’s adventure novel) attempts to reframe journeys of migrants from Mexico to California as a heroic quest. Yet this is done through mostly unremarkable landscape images, sutured together in a narrative that’s unconvincing. De Middel experienced real danger while making the images along these routes – perils all migrants face – but that is edited out. Does heroism exclude hardship?
In one image, a portrait of a young, unnamed migrant woman stands on the border on the beach in Tijuana, wearing a jumper with Donald Trump’s giant pouting face on it, preparing to enter a country with a “Remain in Mexico” policy. It reads too much like a joke at the migrant’s expense. In another conceit, De Middel depicts high-jump athletes training next to the Tortilla Wall, a particularly perilous crossing point from Baja California into San Diego. De Middel sets out to reinvent the story of Mexican migration into the US for western viewers in this series, but the stifling symbolism is too glib and glossy to achieve that.
It does get better. Waiting in the next room are knockout works by American photographer Rahim Fortune, a selection from his nominated Hardtack book, reproduced as sumptuous black-and-white silver gelatin prints for the wall. Hardtack refers to the unleavened bread used as a survival food by buffalo soldiers and later adapted by Black cowboys and ranchers. Fortune’s glorious documentary images take us between the topographies and people of rural communities in the southern states, where he grew up and where metaphors of survival and persistence abound.
Whether depicting settler-era wooden homes, whose history speaks through their hurried architecture, or a new father tenderly holding his infant, Fortune’s photographs shimmer and scintillate. There is grace and humility in a portrait of three praise dancers in Edna, Texas, heads bowed and arms thrust out in spiritual abandon; and a pearlescent pageant queen who is all gossamer glow. In this tender portrait of Black life in the American south, the tattered facade of Sam’s BBQ, in Austin, confronts what lingers ominously in the American landscape, with its hand-painted sign reading: “We may have come on different ships but we’re in the same boat now.”
The Peruvian-American artist Tarrah Krajnak is the wild card this year, but brings the laughs. In one series, Krajnak playfully re-enacts images from Edward Weston’s 1977 book of nudes. There’s a restaging of a 1942 image of model Charis Wilson reclining on a sofa, wearing a gas mask she’d been issued as a volunteer for the Aircraft Warning Service. Krajnak replicates the image, including the fern frond Weston used, but switches up the composition, creating a diptych so that her body is cut in two. It is a pithy deconstruction that shows up the coldness of Weston’s gaze on women’s bodies in his sculptural, fragmented figures.
I wonder if Krajnak was also inspired by Weston’s challenge to “photograph a rock, have it look like a rock, but be more than a rock” in her series Automatic Rocks/Excavation in which she digs up stones from her garden, names them, cradles them for a time, then takes pictures of them. It’s bonkers, but irrepressibly fun.
Lindokuhle Sobekwa, the final artist in the show, would be a worthy winner for the £30,000 prize (which is announced in May). Sobekwa’s gripping project, I Carry Her Photo With Me, is reimagined in a slideshow, with a gorgeous musical score by Nduduzo Makhathini, and a constellation of images scattered in fragments across the walls, in keeping with the rawness of the original spiral-bound scrapbook.
It is a journey of shocking loss. When Sobekwa was seven, his sister Ziyanda (then 13) was chasing him when he was hit by a car and badly injured. Ziyanda then ran away and didn’t return home for nearly a decade. She was eventually found living in a hostel, but died soon after, aged 22. She would not allow Sobekwa to take her photograph, an absence that looms large.
In lo-fi images, he combs the misty, dilapidated, disenfranchised landscapes of the South African township complex where he grew up, once the site of a bloody taxi war. He sees glimpses of his late sister’s face in other young women he meets at the hostel. Slowly the sense of the family’s loss merges with the masses who have disappeared into the void of violence during (and since) apartheid. Diary entries are scribbled and urgent, the pencil pressed hard to the paper.
The pain of Sobekwa’s grief is penetrating; in one image, he catches his shadow cast over her grave. His photographs are often hazy, evanescent light fading like memories, the camera trying to clutch and fix the image before it is gone for ever.
