Who would have thought that so close to Oxford Street, headache-inducing caricature of the nation’s identikit high streets that it is, Great Marlborough Street would reside, a civilized and calm conduit of the Capital’s finest culture creators. Culture creators with smart suits and serious rosé habits, who have long since outgrown their boho-clobber. And right between these parallel universes, on the barely-noticeable Ramillies Street, we find the new home of The Photographers Gallery. It is a very efficient three-tier cuboid of display. If Muji did art galleries, they’d be like this.
The prize exhibition began on the 20th of February, and for a few nail-biting weeks of suspense, we wondered where the fickle finger of fate would land, and what arguments we would have to have about it, while the winner went off to Jessop’s to fritter away their £30,000.
The winner, it turns out, is Paul Graham. Graham’s work is pure uninterventionalist America-watching, with a dark profundity to it. A fat man in America pulls on a cigarette like he really needs it outside a drab white building. He’s shuffling about, going nowhere until the end of his fix. And he’s doing the the same again. And again. And again. Some trees in America do nothing. And again. And again. The book that led to his nomination is entitled A Shimmer Of Possibility. It’s all as dry as this, yet strangely moving. A sequence of the book depicts one hard-on-his-luck chap striding across New York tensely, again with a cigarette, yet each shot is followed by a shot of a magnificent, yet naturally composed North Dakota sunset. It’s just the very idea that one man’s drab life and lack of purpose coexists with the world’s beauty. A beauty that cares not at all, but still offers a redemptive temple for prayer. It’s inevitable that this will be compared with Robert Franks’ The Americans. It’s a valid comparison, since critical distance is the backbone of each body of work. But A Shimmer Of Possibility is not an update, but more a change of gear, with all dynamism and gusto drained from The Land Of The Free, the better to imprison them within our gaze. But that’s the book.
The exhibition space doesn’t really have room to display a significant proportion of Graham’s slow narratives. The small selection here should be taken as an existentialist aperitif, and is not necessarily the most potent of his output.
Moving up two floors, you’ll find the three runners-up. Tod Papageorge is responsible for taking pictures of people in Central Park constantly for twenty-two years (1969-1991). These are bizarre little vignettes situated within the expanse of Manhattan’s great lawn. It’s a bit like zooming into a Watteau and finding little scenes depicting the strangeness of twentieth century life. A young couple stretched out on a blanket in the sun. A scruffy man combs his son’s hair in a clearing. In a very compelling shot, a black man lies in repose before a chessboard. The black pieces are his. The white pieces belong to the gallery-going public. Is this a meaningless chance happening, or composed confrontation? It drives right to the core of what apparently out-on-the-prowl photography can be, asking the viewer what they can see, and are they right to see it.
The next encounter is with the work of Taryn Simon. I found her the most fascinating exhibitor here. These photographs constitute a very focused project, to catalogue aspects of America that are normally hidden or unfamiliar. The hydroponic marijuana room at a licensed research lab. A cryopreservation unit that holds the bodies of the wife and mother of cryogenics expert Robert Ettinger. A couple of thousand nuclear waste capsules sitting at the bottom of a watery containment facility in Washington State. A Braille edition of Playboy magazine. Finches in quarantine. The seized contraband room at JFK airport, full of tropical plants, odd food, diseased vegetation, and bushmeat, all awaiting incineration. These glimpses off the radar, though all beautifully captured, lack a consistent visual style. The subject is paramount, to a documentary degree, and each must be captured on its own terms. Simon is really allowing her issues to speak for themselves, be it with humour, disgust, or merely what Stephen fry would call Quite Interesting-ness. It’s a glimpse behind the curtain, bringing your conspiracy theory gland into the real world, for each composition is an altercation between your notions of real and normal, usually wedded, now in uncomfortable stand-off. The most powerful piece is a heart-wrenching portrait of Kenny, a white tiger, residing at an animal refuge, selectively inbred as a status pet by Arkansas half-wits, themselves perhaps inbred. Kenny has breathing difficulties, malformed bones and teeth, and cannot close his jaw. His siblings are even worse off, apparently. Looking into Kenny’s eyes and wondering, identifying, is overwhelming. Elsewhere on the spectrum is an interior of the CIA’s art collection offices. Simple yet sinister, this makes you wonder about all the things you still can’t see, all the dirty interventions by Intelligence Agents in our beloved realm of culture.
Simon’s project is almost journalistic, and the photos need to be accompanied by the little text labels, which explain these otherwise very disparate images. However, if that constitutes a dilution of the definition of a photographer, it’s nothing next to Emily Jacir’s deviation. She presents an archive of the life of Walter Zuaiter, a Palestinian intellectual who was assassinated in Rome by Israel’s Wrath Of God Operation in 1972, after they linked him, perhaps falsely, to the Munich Olympics massacre.
Jacir would have been two years old at the time, and I’m assuming she didn’t take the photos herself. She is an archivist, perhaps a curator, likely an artist, certainly a fangirl, but I can’t see how she could be called a photographer. Photography Prize, remember? It’s easy to redefine art for found objects, but the word photography is a bit more specific than that. I suppose that’s just semantics. It may not be in the right place, but it is worth seeing, and is a tragic memory of this intriguing life. She displays a selection of paperbacks that he had read, along with letters, and old photographs as a way to create some space for the personal amidst the political, the human amongst the historical. And it’s good that not everything here is about America.
The show overall is a pretty still, meditative, even modest affair. Beauty abounds. And thought. The Deutsche Börse Prize turns all of this into a big discussion about art and value. To award one prize is a shame, and probabilistically, only a quarter of people would agree with the choice of Graham, but art, at least, wins on the ground floor, and the second floor. The filling to this Photography sandwich is a shop for photography books and prints and coffee. The hordes of Oxford Street will never know. Don’t be one of them.
The Exhibition runs until April 12.
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