©Simon Bowcock 2011
As is customary, the predominantly post-modern Deutsche Börse Photographic Prize has four nominees on show. Thomas Demand’s exhibit consists of a single photograph of what looks like a bizarre store room for church organ spares (it turns out he makes paper sets and photographs them, and that this particular work is about comradeship and memory). Roe Ethridge’s oeuvre is to some extent photography about photography, and he seems to be making a point about our perceptions of art and commerce with his series of seemingly disconnected objects (a wood lattice, a ballerina’s feet, a painterly bowl of mouldy fruit, etc.) The double-exposed eyes of Elad Lassry’s Man 071 2007 is an interesting update of Man Ray’s Marquise Casati 1922, but otherwise his pictures (e.g. a bloke on a beach, a lipstick) are highly unremarkable, which actually turns out to be the point.
The work of the final nominee, Jim Goldberg, is imaginative, collaborative, wide ranging and (at times) beautifully executed. Its simplicity and directness makes the other nominees’ work look feeble and contrived. Seemingly the most traditional, Goldberg is in reality the most daring of the four.
Goldberg could be described as a concerned photographer working in the documentary mode, although his style favours the poetic over the prosaic and factual. His subject here is the migration of people, often in the direst of circumstances. Formally, the photographs are a mish-mash, from large format to tiny polaroid, monochrome to colour, even colour negatives to black-and-white contact prints, with production values ranging from the highest to the very lowest. Some (mostly polaroids) have writing on or around them, sometimes with a translation, sometimes without, ranging from simple messages (such as I am a whore, or We have only seen father once in life) to a complex scrawled map of a long, multi-country journey. On a few images, faces have been obscured or even obliterated. You can make presumptions, but it is often not explicitly clear who wielded the pen, or even who took the photograph.
Many photographers claim their work involves a deep collaboration with their subjects, but in reality this seldom comes across at all to the impartial viewer. Goldberg's dynamic photographic approach, and use of text, means many of his photographs are truly collaborative. Even the title of the project, Open See, is a collaboration (ostensibly written by one of his subjects on a photograph), with meaning on many levels: a simple exhortation of “open and see” the photographs in the 2009 book of the same name; “hope and see” how things turn out; “open sea” without borders (which is what the subject intended); etc.
However, there is a cost to Goldberg's mercurial style. Firstly, the formal incoherence of the photographs is consistent with an overall lack of clarity of information. We learn that the world is a terribly brutal place, but the scale of Goldberg's subject is so vast and complex (and the information in the images inevitably so relatively scant) we do not really learn that much about how or why things are this way. While some of the images work extremely well artistically and emotionally, the work is much less strong if viewed as documentary photography in the conventional sense – perhaps surprising for a member of Magnum. Secondly, even acknowledging the gargantuan scale of Goldberg's project, the sheer mass of the material presented dilutes its effect, and a tighter edit may actually prove significantly more powerful.
But perhaps these criticisms don't matter so much. I have to admit to being stubbornly agnostic when it comes to concerned photography, mainly because it often just doesn’t work for me: still images seldom convey social issues well, especially compared with other media such as the written word or moving pictures. Goldberg’s collaborative approach overcomes some of photography’s usual shortcomings in this sphere, and occasionally cuts straight to the very heart of the human stories. Here and there, the hand annotation adds so much weight to a photograph, it elevates it from the particular to the universal, revealing Goldberg as a much greater artist than many of his more precious and more famous peers. For me, the most affecting photograph is hardly a photograph at all: a small scrap of near total pitch darkness, save for a barely perceptible, haunting face and the translated words: My life is sick because of what they do to me.
Like all great ideas and much great art, Goldberg’s work is occasionally so simple and effective it seems obvious. Of course it has its problems, but it is nonetheless original, brave and at times moving, and wins the 2011 Prize by a country mile.
©Simon Bowcock 2011
Link:
Venues:
Ambika P3 London 5th April to 1st May
C/O Berlin 13th May to 19th June 2011
The Cube, Eschborn, Frankfurt am Main 2011 dates to be confirmed
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