Photography fans should stop in at the Photographer’s Gallery near Regent Street in London. The work of four very different shortlisted candidates for this year’s Deutsche Borse Photography Prize is on display until June 22, 2014. They are Richard Mosse, who represented Ireland in last year’s Venice Biennale with his haunting video installation ‘Enclave’, Lorna Simpson from the US, Alberto Garcia-Alix from Spain (a Salvador Dali lookalike if you can imagine Dali trading in his moustache for tattoos and heroine) and biologist-trained Jochen Lempert from Germany.
These images are by Richard Mosse whose focus is the ongoing Civil War in the Democratic Republic of Congo where few traces remain of the human devastation that has left 5.4 million people dead in the last 15 years. Mosse uses discontinued infrared colour film which was used during Vietnam by the military to detect camouflaged targets. I found the images in psychedelic pink both beautiful and disturbing. I wish I’d seen ‘Enclave’ which was shown nearby at an NCP parking garage until last Saturday.
The work of the other three candidates is also captivating. While Simpson and Garcia-Alix’s images are easier to grasp, don’t skip the more subtle photographs of Lempert who makes poetic, scientific and often humorous links between the plant and animal world.
And stay tuned for another cool photography award show (see photo above) at the Victoria & Albert; This year’s theme for the Prix Pictet Global Photography Exhibition is consumption, and it opens May 22nd. See the 11 shortlisted candidates here.
April, 2014
