The annual Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize is awarded to the best photography exhibition staged, or the best photography book published, in Europe, in the preceding twelve months. Obviously they start with a long list, then select a short list, from which are chosen four finalists, and it’s the four finalists’ work which features in this annual exhibition at the Photographer’s Gallery. The winner is announced on 15 May and will be awarded a handsome £30,000 prize, with the other finalists each receiving £5,000.

As usual, each of the four photographers are represented by projects or books which usually take a bit of explaining. Each photographer has a room each devoted to their project. This year’s four finalists are (in alphabetical order):

• Cristina De Middel
• Rahim Fortune
• Tarrah Krajnak
• Lindokuhle Sobekwa

1. Cristina De Middel (b. 1975, Spain)

De Middel’s project is titled ‘Journey to the Centre’. It’s a photographic testament to the migrants who cross Mexico from South America with the aim of getting into the United States. So it starts off from Tapachula, a town on the southern border of Mexico (with Guatemala) and then covers the trail heading north until it reaches the famous Trump wall, just this side of the border, across from an American town with the ironic name of Felicity.

First off what strikes you about Middel’s room is that it is dominated by a massive orange metal frame on which hang some of her images, presumably representing the Trump Wall.

Installation view of ‘Journey to the Centre’ by Cristina De Middel at the Photographers’ Gallery (photo by the author)

Next thing you notice is that the photos are interspersed by what appear to be picture cards from a game I’m not familiar with.

Installation view of ‘Journey to the Centre’ by Cristina De Middel at the Photographers’ Gallery (photo by the author)

When you look closer you see that the images in the cards are recreated or strongly echoed in the photos placed alongside them. So in this installation view the big picture of the sun is echoed on its left by a photo of a woman holding her hand up to protect herself from the sun, while the red figure of El Diablo is echoed on its right by a man wearing a bright red cloak. This parallelism between the big bright cards and Middel’s clear bright photos is much more obvious than the rather more muted and obscure references to the Jules Verne novel.

The card-photo juxtaposition is also, you come to realise, funny.

Next thing you quickly notice is how classically Middel’s photos are framed and composed. The subjects are in the middle, shot very cleanly and crisply in perfect focus, with a nice space all around, giving a classic, almost studio effect, although all of them are clearly shot on location.

Installation view of ‘Journey to the Centre’ by Cristina De Middel at the Photographers’ Gallery (photo by the author)

In this (admittedly not great) installation shot, you can see at the top-left how the single boot, abandoned and half buried in the desert sand, is shot at just the right distance, square on, with plenty of space around it, so that it almost looks like an image from a surreal ad.

Same with the guy apparently preparing to pole vault over Trump’s Wall – the wall itself is framed carefully so that we fully see its continuation into the sea, while the high jumper himself is set as squarely in the middle of the shot as possible.

These are not casual shots. They have all been carefully composed and framed. And it’s the resultant timeless, classic effect which makes them so appealing. As I’ve said, almost every one looks like an ad for something, whether a commercial product or a charity, but all with a kind of classic, commercial perfectness.

Installation view of ‘Journey to the Centre’ by Cristina De Middel at the Photographers’ Gallery (photo by the author)

Finally, as you can see in this installation view, there’s also a display case showing some of the bric-a-brac Middel came across in her pilgrimage across Mexico, abandoned shoes and the like.

It was only after I’d been round the room three or four times that I realised something else, something connected to the advertisement-style finish, which is the absence of people. Certainly about half of the images feature a person, but only one. Whereas of the ten photos hanging on the frame in my first installation view, only one or two of them feature a human being at all, the other eight or nine are bereft of people – stark but beautifully composed and shot images of the desert, of cacti and scrubland, an ancient pyramid, a Welcome tourists sign, a vivid one of a burned-out car, and so on.

Now when I’ve seen news footage of migrants trekking north through Mexico to try and reach the United States, it’s generally been in family groups, sometimes in big crowds. The curators claim that Middel’s work is challenging stereotypes about the migrants who trek across Mexico to reach America, but the impression I had is that she’s more or less erased those migrants in order to be left with consciously poignant images of emptiness and abandonment.

• Inside Cristina De Middel’s ‘Journey to the Center of the World’

2. Rahim Fortune

From one project about America to another. Rahim Fortune is a young American Black man. His room doesn’t have a big metal frame or any props, just the old-fashioned thing of 30 or so crisp black-and-white photos depicting aspects of Black culture and community from his home state of Texas and the American South.

His project is titled ‘Hardtack’ which requires a word of explanation.

Hardtack is an unleavened bread made with flour, water and salt that was typical of the southern states of America during the Civil War era. Due to its extremely long shelf life, hardtack is long associated with survivalism and land migration. Fortune draws on this as a metaphor for the enduring nature of Black culture and traditions.

All his photos are great, beautifully framed and beautifully shot, classic, very achieved. But, I’m afraid to say, I feel like I’ve seen them all before. Old Black guys who look like they’ve had a hard life, sweet Black bridesmaids dressed in white at a wedding, the Revivalist meeting, the worn old clapperboard Baptist chapels, random people on horseback emphasising the rural backwardness of the region, I feel like I’ve seen them all before.

Praise Dancers in Edna, Texas by Rahim Fortune (2022) © Rahim Fortune

I felt guilty thinking this but then I came across Fortune himself articulating the thought in the three-minute interview he gave the gallery.

Interview with Rahim Fortune

In his own words:

“There’s a lot of baggage that comes with photographing in the American South. There’s so much photographic fog and fodder and it’s a place that’s been so heavily photographed.”

Well, like I say, all his images are beautifully composed and shot, displaying wonderful technique, and I really liked quite a few of them, it’s just that… I feel like I’ve seen many of them, or shots very like them, lots of times before.

Windmill House by Rahim Fortune © Rahim Fortune

And America again! The rules of the competition are that the prize is awarded to an outstanding exhibition held in Europe so why are these finalists from or about America? Are we seriously to believe that no photography exhibition and no photography book by any European photographer merited inclusion?

3. Tarrah Krajnak

This oppressive sense of American cultural dominance continues with the third finalist, Tarrah Krajnak. Krajnak was born in an orphanage in Lima, Peru, in 1979 and adopted by Slovak-Americans. She is now an American citizen who lives and works in Eugene, Oregon, USA. The curators explain that she subverts this and interrogates that, but the one thing she isn’t interrogating is the American cultural dominance of this exhibition.

In the Krajnak room there’s a massive blue painting and a video but the real meat is two series of black and white works on opposite walls. One of them is titled ‘Self-Portrait as Weston’ which needs a word of explanation: in 1977 a book was published collecting together the the best of the stylised studies of the female nude which classic American photographer Edward Weston had made during his long career (1886 to 1958). So Krajnak (an Associate Professor of Photography at the University of Oregon and so well-versed in the canon) had the bright idea of taking photos of herself nude re-enacting the same poses as the classic Weston poses, with the Weston book placed in shot, open to the relevant image she is recreating or pastiching or subverting.

Self-Portrait as Weston #4 by Tarrah Krajnak © Tarrah Krajnak

You can almost hear Krajnak explaining that she is subverting the male gaze and interrogating the male canon and asserting women’s agency. You can feel her saying ‘This is what a real woman looks like’, her own naked body being a realistic, common-or-garden human shape rather than the svelte and sexy women Weston (sexistly) featured in his studies.

Installation view of ‘Self-Portrait as Weston’ by Tarrah Krajnak at the Photographers’ Gallery (photo by the author)

There are 16 of these homages/subversions, all neatly laid out in rows on the bare white gallery wall. You can see how the walls in the photos are grubby and have a developing world vibe, more like Peru or Mexico than the spick and span studios of the University of Oregon.

I also think the prints have been treated in some way to make them appear agèd, maybe this is what the curators mean when they refer to Krajnak’s use of ‘pigment prints’ and other technical processes. I assume this is all an attempt to recreate the atmosphere of the original Weston photos, some of which date from the 1920s and ’30s.

I dare say Krajnak is interrogating the male gaze and subverting the canon of dead white males, asserting her agency and all the other buzzwords of feminist academia, but it seems like a tired trope to me. As recently as a month ago I visited the exhibitions of Mickalene Thomas and Linder who have both, for decades, been depicting half-naked women in a bid to subvert the male gaze and assert female agency and interrogate the canon of white male art and so on. I do get the idea and am pretty bored by it. Subverting the male gaze isn’t nowadays a radical strategy, if it ever was one, but more a well-established genre like photographs of flowers or village fetes.

My wife, a feminist businesswoman, didn’t like the series because of its obvious and formulaic preachiness; she far preferred the other series in the room, ‘Rock, Paper, Sun’ from 2023.

Installation view of ‘Rock, Paper, Sun’ by Tarrah Krajnak at the Photographers’ Gallery (photo by the author)

Also black-and-white images which have been treated or printed to give the effect of age and depth, this is a series of images of Krajnak holding rocks of different shapes, placed next to photos of her notebook in which she’s sketched each rock and described her feelings about it.

My wife particularly liked the idea that if you hold the rocks long enough, they start to talk to you, to communicate their stories. We both liked that very much.

• Images of Rock, Paper, Sun on the Tarrah Krajnak website

On the third wall was a smaller set which in a sense combines the best of the other two, in that they are again self portraits, of her whole body (though fully dressed, this time) engaging with rocks. They’re lovely images of her curling up and cuddling rocks and boulders.

‘Sister Rock/Rock that Tries to Forget (from Automatic Rocks/Excavation)’ by Tarrah Kjanak (2020) © Tarrah Krajnak

These feel sweet and lovely and genuinely do convey some sense of harmony between humans and the environment. They’re beautiful because they sweetly convey a beautiful sentiment. They’re gentle. They suggest closure and harmony in a way not many of the other images in the show do.

(The rock hugging reminded me a bit of the tree hugging Chipko movement of women from the villages of the Garhwal Hills in the Himalayas in Uttarakhand as photographed by Pamela Singh and featured in the Barbican exhibition RE/SISTERS: A Lens on Gender and Ecology.)

4. Lindokuhle Sobekwa

The fourth and final entrant is not from or about America, which makes a nice change, although it is from another over-familiar country, South Africa. It’s a room devoted to the highly personal project of the South African (male) photographer Lindokuhle Sobekwa titled ‘I carry Her photo with Me’. Like the others, this needs some explanation.

The project began when Sobekwa found a family portrait with his older sister Ziyanda’s face cut out. It remains the only photograph he has of her. One day when the siblings were seven and thirteen, she chased him and he was hit by a car and badly injured. She disappeared hours later, only returning a decade later, ill. By this time Sobekwa had become a photographer. He tried to take her portrait, but stopped when she reacted angrily. Ziyanda died soon after.

Tragic story of a broken family. The display combines family photographs, handwritten notes, sketches and drawings, as well as photos of the wider environment around Sobekwa’s home, to create a scrapbook-like effect which is deeply rooted in his family but reaches out, as it were, to portray the crushing poverty deeply embedded in South African society to this day.

Again, as with the technically perfect images of Rahim Fortune, many of the photos here are wonderful – an old woman labouring a ploughed field in a vast derelict expanse, a dejected Black woman sitting in a shiny bathroom (the poster image for the whole show) and the one I liked best, a middle-aged Black woman in what looks like a shanty shack, reading by candlelight.

From ‘I carry Her photo with Me’ by Lindokuhle Sobekwa

But, well, like the Fortune set, I feel I know the outline of this story, in fact I am over-familiar with it. Apartheid was terrible. Thirty five years after its fall, there’s still crushing poverty in South Africa. None of this is news. I’m sure I’ve seen loads of photojournalism about grim lives in South Africa, in fact all I had to do was look up last year’s Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize to discover that it, also, featured the work of a Black South African photographer chronicling Black poverty, Lebohang Kganye. Maybe there’s a clause in the competition saying there always has to be an entry from South Africa – and that the curators have to mention the world ‘colonialism’ at least once in every exhibition.

Interview with Lindokuhle Sobekwa

• Lindokuhle Sobekwa’s page on the Magnum website
• I carry Her photo with Me on the Magnum website

Sobekwa’s personal story and the inclusion of many pages from his scrapbooks, complete with scribbled text and rough drawings projected onto one wall, give this room a distinctive flavour – but then I’m sure I’ve seen the inclusion of a photographer’s scrapbooks and notebooks in at least two other photography exhibitions in the past few years.

In fact arguably the most distinctive thing about his room was the very beautiful, calm if slightly sentimental piano music playing in it. This, we learn, was composed specially for the exhibition, ‘Meditations for Ziyanda’ by Nduduzo Makhathini. This lovely lulling music makes the Sobekwa room the nicest one to linger in, although the actual imagery is (deliberately) the most scrappy and fragmented.

Thoughts: Old

If there’s one thing my kids, now in their early 20s, have taught me, it’s that I’m completely out of date. My entire worldview of what is radical or strange, what is politically or culturally important, what music, films, art or photography I like, not only seem out of date to them, but irrelevant to their tastes and concerns and anxieties.

They live in a hyper-digital age where billions of images and videos about everything are available all the time and they are continually adding to the vast pile by sending each other Snapchat, Whatsapp and TikTok images and texts and sounds all the time.

Even the idea of going to an art or photography gallery seems to them like an incredibly out-of-date, Stone Age thing to do. Why bother when all the art you could ever want to see and much more is available at the touch of a finger?

It’s with this in mind that my overall feeling about the show was how old it all seemed, how old and tired and clichéd so many of the images and earnest concerns seemed.

1. Oh the poor migrants trekking across Mexico to smuggle themselves into America, how long has that being going on? I remember liking the Jack Nicholson movie ‘The Border’, about the US border patrol and the misery of migrants trying to cross into rich America, and that dates from 1982.

2. Similarly, I remember protesting against apartheid South Africa as a student, the radical press swimming in images of the poverty-stricken townships, in the 1980s.

3. I grew up in the 1970s amid the backwash of images from the American Civil Rights movement and pictures of poor rural Blacks in the American South abounded in Sunday supplement photo-essays, in books and posters and movies, half a century ago.

4. Hugging trees and rocks may be a little more recent but concern for the environment likewise dates back to the 1970s when Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace and all the others were founded. I’ve always loved the land art of Richard Long, featuring immaculate photos of rocks and boulders similar to the ones in Krajnak’s work, and he started doing that in the late 1960s.

So, completely contrary to the curators’ claim that these works are somehow cutting edge, state-of-the-art and addressing bang up-to-date issues, I felt the exact opposite. All of them seemed to me to be not only 1) addressing issues which were old and familiar before some of these photographers were even born but 2) in a curiously static, classic and old-fashioned aesthetic which also feels very dated.

Where’s the photography which captures the all-enveloping digital realm all of us live in these days, and register the complex effect that’s had on our perceptions of ‘reality’ and value? Not here, not by a long shot. All four photographers here soak us in the warm and comforting ambience of well-worn and familiar and easily assimilable issues, presented in reassuringly familiar styles.

Making America great again

I know I bang on about it but the inclusion of three projects about or America or the American border made me wonder: were there really no photographers from Europe, no European photography projects, no European photography books, covering European subjects, worthy of inclusion among the finalists?

No photography exhibitions anywhere in Europe about the war in Ukraine, about refugees, about the long afterglow of the wars in Yugoslavia, about the rise of right-wing parties in Italy, Germany, about the bombs and gang warfare in Sweden. No stories and no photographers from Europe? Apparently not. America again. And again. And again.

It feels like the curators, despite all their progressive rhetoric, despite all their conscious intentions, despite Donald Trump demonstrating to the whole world that America is nobody’s friend and should be nobody’s icon, and the obvious fact that we need to consciously decouple – politically, militarily and culturally – from a country which chose authoritarian mobster rule, cannot shake off the dead hand of American cultural imperialism.

Who do you think should win?

From what I’ve shown you and what you can see for yourselves on the links I’ve provided, who do you think should win? Obviously they’re all highly accomplished and technically adept. For me it’s a toss-up between Middel’s advert-slick images of the Mexican desert and the humour of juxtaposing her images with those big colourful playing cards – and Krajnak’s images of her hands holding rocks or herself cuddling a big boulder, for their gentleness and sweetness. Tricky choice. Who would you vote for?

Promo video

Related links

• Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2025 continues at the Photographers’ Gallery until 15 June 2025
• The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2025 website

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