The Citigroup Photography Prize 2004 is now showing at London’s Photographers’ Gallery in Great Newport Street. All landscape artists, but taking vastly different approaches to the genre, the four nominees stand in stark contrast to the controversial nominees of recent years.
A cramped exhibition space at the best of times, the organisers have cleverly placed Joel SternfeldÔøΩs visually arresting photographs closest to the entrance. Large, vivid, and funny, these are not photographs that you unwittingly walk straight past. Sternfeld traversed the United States in his youth with little more than a large view camera, photographing the American landscape along the way. A renegade elephant lays exhausted on a road, soapy water running off its back down a hill. A farmhouse burns in an autumnal field, while a firefighter in the foreground surreally finds time to buy a pumpkin. A Californian landslide leaves pristine houses in the top half of the picture, and devestation in the lower half. In an accompanying video for the show, Sternfeld admits that the public is probably sick of his irony-heavy images, but the clumps of people in front of each of these pictures indicate otherwise. Steadily Sternfeld has been photographing the march of time itself. With ÔøΩOn This SiteÔøΩ he revisits the locations of famous moments in American History, in ÔøΩStranger PassingÔøΩ he sets up his large camera in every day locations and asks passers-by to pose, and ÔøΩWalking the High LineÔøΩ chronicles New York City from an abandoned elevated railway line. Few New Yorkers know about the High Line, and fewer still have ventured onto it. SternfeldÔøΩs photographs force us to stop and consider the landscapes that are all around us, if only we took the time to look.
At the other end of the gallery are a selection of the works by Robert Adams. Taken in the 1970s as surburbia began to encroach on the wilderness of Colorado, there is little in the way of happiness or drama here. Printed rather small, the photographs invite you toward and into them, creating the claustrophobia that AdamÔøΩs must have felt himself while he watched land being replaced with concrete. For decades Adams has been relentlessly photographing the changing landscape, asking us if we even notice the changes happening. A prolific writer and teacher, it is Adams more than the other nominees that fits the PrizeÔøΩs purpose of awarding a photographer of great influence who has not received the recognition that his influence deserves, but he is perhaps the peast likely to be awarded it.
David Goldblatt has devoted his career to the documentation of everyday life during and after the decades of apartheid in South Africa, particularly to how it effects the landscape. Far from the front-page news photographs of violence and injustice, GoldblattÔøΩs photographs show the tedium and drudgery of life under segregation. A black youth with both arms in stark white plaster casts after being beaten by police, slave labour commuters passed out on a bus, and an impressionistic photograph of mine workers show what life was like for the majority of the population. But it is the people-less photographs that are most telling. A post office store front photographed in 1974 and then again in 1988. On the left, the 1974 photograph shows two entrances, one for whites, one for blacks. History has literally been walled over in the 1988 photograph to the right, the door for blacks replaced as if it had never existed. Little else is different in the two shots. In another photograph, bricks on the curved walls of a Dutch Reformist Church reflect light back in every gradation of black to white tones, an African identity shaping the landscape in the darkest days of apartheid.
Fifty years ago Henri Cartier-Bresson coined the term ÔøΩthe decisive momentÔøΩ to describe that fleeting instant when a great photographic opportunity materialises and then vanishes forever. Peter Fraser, in an accompanying interview, says that for him the decisive moment is that split second when his mind reaches such a clarity of vision that he realises the potential of an everyday scene to become something special. His large prints of small scenes are landscapes few of us ever notice. Vivid and saturated, the photographs remind me of a strange combination of Eggleston and Parr. A piece of paper lies on floorboards surrounded by dust and hair. A styrofoam cup is punctured by dozens of toothpicks and lies on a shelf catching the light. Constellations appear reflected in an oily puddle, and all sense of scale is lost. Like the other nominees, Fraser forces us to stop and consider not only the landscape around us, but the definition of landscape photography itself.
The winner is announced March 4th, and the nominees are on show until March 28th.
