Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2011 at The Photographers' Gallery on artrepublic.com

This year Thomas Demand, Roe Ethridge, Jim Goldberg and Elad Lassry have been nominatedfor the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2011. This year’s selection, the fifteenth year of thePrize and the 40th anniversary of The Photographers’ Gallery, illustrates the diversity of thephotographic medium, ranging from conceptual to social documentary photography.The Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2011 is presented by The Photographers’ Gallery,London. For 2011 it will be shown at Ambika P3 at the University of Westminster,35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 while the Gallery is closed for extensive redevelopment to create new galleries and an education floor, reopening late 2011. The annual award of£30,000 rewards a living photographer of any nationality, who has made the mostsignificant contribution, in exhibition or publication format, to the medium of photography in Europe between 1 October 2009 and 30 September 2010. The winner will be announcedat a special ceremony at Ambika P3 on 26 April 2011.

The four shortlisted artists for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2011 are:

Destroy

Thomas Demand (b. 1964, Germany) has been nominated for his exhibition Nationalgalerie atNeue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany (18 September 2009 – 17 January 2010), travelling toBoijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands (29 May – 22 August 2010). In this exhibition,Demand’s concise yet strangely unsettling images explore German social and political public life.Often using photographs drawn from the media, Demand turns these scenes into life-size andmeticulously constructed three-dimensional paper models, that he then photographs. Rangingfrom the interior of the Bonn parliament of the late 1960s to the artist’s childhood room, thespaces subtly reveal the mechanisms of their making and challenge the viewer’s perception ofreality by examining memory and photographic truth.

Destroy

Roe Ethridge (b. 1969, USA) has been nominated for his solo exhibition at Les Rencontresd’Arles 2010, France (3 July – 19 September 2010). Blurring the boundaries of the commercialwith the editorial, and the mundane with the highbrow, Ethridge’s conceptual approach tophotography is a playful attack on the traditions and conventions of the medium itself. Oftenborrowing ‘outtakes’ from his own commercial work, Ethridge readily counterpoises a catwalkshot with a still-life of a pumpkin or a pastoral scene of cows grazing. His distinct but elusive andpoetic groupings of portraits, landscapes and still lifes create new associations and embrace thearbitrariness of the image and image making.

Destroy

Jim Goldberg (b. 1953, USA) has been nominated for his exhibition Open See at ThePhotographers’ Gallery, London (16 October 2009 – 31 January 2010). Initiated through a Magnum commission, Open See documents the experiences of refugee, immigrant and trafficked populations who travel from war torn, socially and economically devastated countries to make new lives in Europe. Fusing Polaroids, video, written text, ephemera and large and medium format photographs (taken in places as varied as Iraq, Bangladesh, China, The Balkans and Congo), Goldberg uses his varied and experimental approach to photographic story telling to reflect on issues of migration and the conditions for desiring escape.

Elad Lassry (b. 1977, Israel) has been nominated for his exhibition Elad Lassry at KunsthalleZürich, Switzerland (13 February – 25 April 2010). Elad Lassry’s small-scale photographs slipeffortlessly between genres, depicting plastic still-lives, uncanny publicity portraits, collages,animals and landscapes. Thoroughly familiar and blank at the same time, his images movebeyond the simple category of ‘photography’ and instead ask us to revisit the sensoryexperience of a picture. Overwhelmed by their own intensive colors, shapes and patterns, theimages effectively merge their representation with their abstraction. Lassry also works as afilmmaker and has produced and directed several silent 16mm films, two of which will be shown in this exhibition. 

OPENING HOURS: Daily 11.00 – 18.00, Thur: 11.00 – 20.00

Image Credits:

Thomas Demand, Parlament / Parliament, 2009 © Thomas Demand, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn / DACS, London Courtesy Sprüth Magers Berlin, London/ Esther Schipper, Berlin/ Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

Jim Goldberg, GREECE. Lavrio. 2005. Two detained Afghani refugees point to the refrigerator on which they wrote (approximate translation) "The Sea of Sadness has no shore". (Their English translation is "in the open see (sic) dont have border") Lavrio Detention Center.© Jim Goldberg / Magnum Photos

Roe Ethridge, Thanksgiving 1984, 2009© Roe Ethridge/ Courtesy of Greengrassi London/ Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York