Does Sean O'Hagan Really Get Photography?

It seems to have become an annual event. The short list for the Deutsche Börse Prize is announced. And then Sean O'Hagan promptly writes a column in The Guardian complaining that the jury seems obsessed with "conceptual" photography at the expense of ... well, of things that O'Hagan seems to like better. And, on that matter, O'Hagan seems remarkably self assured. What he prefers, he tells us, is "straight photography – photography without pretensions." No examples of what he means. No sense of which of the now canonical figures in the history of photography would be drummed out of any possible consideration for the Prize. Just a broad complaint. In any case, here is his column from this week. Here and here are two posts, with relevant links, I wrote in response to last year's installment.

Nothing much has changed in my assessment this year. But instead of simply repeating myself, I'd ask you to consider a hypothetical. According to the Prize web page, the Deutsche Börse Prize is awarded "a contemporary photographer of any nationality, who has made the most significant contribution (exhibition or publication) to the medium of photography in Europe in the previous year." When, as will soon enough be the case, Sebastião Salgado completes his Genesis project (which, by the way, The Guardian has been previewing in installments) and publishes the planned for book and mounts the planned for exhibition, will he be eligible for the Deutsche Börse short list by O'Hagan's lights? It is not just that Salgado's work has "pretensions," but it arguably also calls into question in various ways naïve views of photography and its uses. I am not sure how, given his ongoing complaints, O'Hagan could not object if the jury included Salgado for the shortlist. But I am then not at all sure who he might deem worthy of consideration.

Deutsche Börse Photography Prize - 2007 Shortlist

The four shortlisted photographers for the annual Deutsche Börse Photography Prize were announced recently (18 October). They are: Philippe Chancel, Anders Petersen, Fiona Tan and The Atlas Group. The winner won't be announced until early spring. This year the prize was awarded to Robert Adams.

I saw Fiona Tan's "Corrections" installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago a couple of years ago and thought it was good but not great. Anders Petersen might get my vote simply for his "Café Lehmitz," pictures one of which provided the cover image for for Tom Waits' 1985 record Rain Dogs. But I am not sure that an album cover (even a terrific one!) warrants the 30K pound prize. As for Philippe Chancel, I guess I am not overwhelmed either. I find his "Sex Release" clever and his projects on North Korea and Cambodia uninspiring. He hardly seems in the same league as Adams or Petersen.

That leaves The Atlas Group and its tendentious "Archives." This, I think, is immensely creative and provocative work. According to the press realease, the material in the Archives was collected between "1989 and 2004 to research and document the contemporary history of Lebanon. However, the authenticity of the photographic and video documents in this archive are continuously queried, leaving the viewer uncertain how history - in particular one marked by the trauma of civil war - can be told and visually represented. The ‘documents’ in the exhibition appear based on a person’s actual memories but also draw on cultural fantasies constructed from the material of collective memories." Here are a couple of images from the archives:

"Onlookers" © The Atlas Group

"Hostage: The Bachar Tapes" (Video Still) © The Atlas Group.

Although the proper outcome seems quite obvious to me, if I had to put money on it I'd likely opt for Petersen. He's the safe bet. Too bad. Even though his subjects are rather unconventional, his photographs really are not.

Robert Adams

"Nature Photography of even less extreme scenes, but photography that acknowledges what is wrong, is admittedly sometimes hard to bear - it has to encompass our mistakes. Yet in the long run, it is important; in order to endure our age of apocalypse, we have to be reconciled not only to avalanche and hurricane, but to ourselves."

The opening quotation is from Robert Adams' Beauty in Photography (Aperture 1981). Adams is a man of his word. He recently won the 2006 Deutsche Borse Photography Prize for a series of photographs (including the one I have lifted here) focusing on de-forestation and environmental degradation in Oregon. He announced that he would donate the $52K award money to Human Rights Watch. Adams stated: "However concerned I am about the environment, I'm even more concerned at the moment with a collapse in human decency."

Adams has done an extremely admirable thing. Make no mistake about that. And I do not want to seem overly critical, but the basic difficulty here is not simply a deficit of human decency. The source of most of the problems that Human Rights Watch and similar organizations address are political - the failure, whether due to inability or unwillingness, of political authorities and legal agencies to protect vulnerable populations from the powerful actors who prey upon them.