VISUAL ARTS / AIDAN DUNNE: Deutsche Borse Photography Prize 2005, The Photographers' Gallery, 5 and 8 Great Newport St, London Until June 5 00-44-207-8311772
It's hardly accidental that the four photographers who make up the short-list for this year's Deutsche Borse Photography Prize at London's Photographers' Gallery comprise a good cross-section of contemporary approaches to photography. Habitual gallery goers will have noticed that the photograph has long since stormed and overrun the Fine Art citadel. Whereas the art establishment used to be distinctly sniffy about photography's status as art, such distinctions have become largely irrelevant. Photography is everywhere, in myriad guises.
The evolution of The Photographers' Gallery, which opened in 1971, reflects the changing fortunes of photography. Exponents of the art photograph have been subsumed into a wider area encompassing every aspect of fine art practice. A new generation of artists who use photography and, an important distinction, artist photographers have transformed the role of the gallery.
Possibilities have multiplied since the current director, Paul Wombell, took up his post in 1994, but so have challenges, as mainstream fine art curators scramble to get the hottest photographic artists into their shows. Appropriately enough the gallery's head of programming, Charlotte Cotton, has produced a primer The Photograph as Contemporary Art for Thames & Hudson's World of Art series that is both a concise and reasonably comprehensive introduction to the transformed nature of current art photography - and an invaluable reference for students.
The Deutsche Borse prize replaces the erstwhile Citibank Prize. Wombell chairs the five-person Europe-wide jury. Their short-listed photographers, selected from a large number of submissions from institutions across the continent, are Luc Delahaye, JH Engstrom, Jorg Sasse and Stephen Shore. The scope of the list indicates a difficulty attendant not just on this but on art prizes generally. It encompasses work by a long-established American practitioner, now in his late 50s, whose importance and influence is widely acknowledged - Shore. And it includes a project by a relatively young Swede, Engstrom, who is a fledgling talent at the beginning of his career. How to adjudicate between two such disparate cases?
To complicate things even further, one could say that each artist exemplifies a significant and distinctive, to some extent exclusive approach to photography, though there are cross-influences and links. All of which makes for a fascinating exhibition.
Shore chronicled a series of road trips across America in the 1970s in images that make up his classic book Uncommon Places. He had switched from using the standard instrument of reportage, the compact, handheld camera, to a cumbersome 8x10 plate camera that has to be set up on a tripod for each shot and provides exceptionally visual quality.
He approaches the American cultural landscape with a blanket, anthropological curiosity. He eschews conventional photographic tastes for anecdote and visual incident, and seems hypnotically fascinated by the ordinary, the everyday.
Initially, the effect was to make people look anew at a world taken more or less for granted. If that effect has faded, it's because Shore's work has been hugely influential and his approach widely imitated and developed. While his studies of streetscapes and motel rooms are engrossing, they confound narrative expectations, offering us a world of unexplained surfaces. There is one exception: a different kind of vitality comes into play in the images featuring his partner, Ginger Shore, including one study in which we see her only from the back as she stands in a swimming pool.
Shore's anthropological objectivity is characteristic of the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher, the German team who can be credited with substantially changing the face of contemporary European art photography, with Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Candida Hofer and the short-listed Jorg Sasse numbering among their former students. For the latter's ongoing project, Tableaux, he takes details from existing photographic images - his own and others, amateur and professional - and enlarges them. They can be striking and spectacular, such as the erupting volcano in Tableau 2613 or, more often, thoroughly mundane.
Sasse makes us look at the way we look at photographs, encourages us to consider the categorisation and structure of images, and provides incidental visual interest along the way, but the blankness of his work is of quite a different order to that of Shore. It comes across as very austere, cerebral and conceptual, and difficult to get particularly exercised about.
Engstrom's listless images, from his publication Trying to Dance, follow in the confessional, autobiographical footsteps of Nan Goldin, Juergen Teller and others. He alternates wan, nude portraits of his friends with wan, disordered interiors and wan, anomalous landscapes. The faded, melancholy quality is a constant and recalls the bleached-out, jaded atmosphere of the paintings of Luc Tuymans. Engstrom's way of linking diverse, fragmentary images echoes the search for an informal, alternative narrative mode found in Teller or Wolfgang Tillmans.
By contrast, the French photographer Luc Delahaye takes on the breadth and depth of the public world with huge energy and ambition. Like Gursky, he explicitly references the European tradition of history painting in his extraordinary large-scale photographic panoramas.
His subjects range from the Milosevic trial to the invasion of Iraq and conflict in Afghanistan, things we are used to seeing in television, newspaper and magazine images. The difference in Delahaye's photographs is not only the epic scale and unprecedented level of detail, but also what can only be described as the painterly qualities of considered composition and detachment.
The £30,000 award is announced on May 11th. From the shortlist Delahaye and Shore stand out head and shoulders but, given the current relevance of his work, it should probably go to Delahaye.
