Photographers' Gallery

Get past the dry sponsor’s name and there’s a terrific nominees exhibition here for this prestigious annual photography prize backed by a German finance company. This year’s judges have narrowed down four photographers – one each from Peru, South Africa, Spain and the USA – each nominated for a specific book or exhibition created in 2024. There’s a slight whiplash effect from moving between such different projects – each of them powerful and involving – but collectively this show is a great testament to just how differently artists can lean into photography in an age where believing what you see is becoming harder and harder. Trust is a powerful tool for a photographer, and you feel it being employed in such different ways in this show. Spanish photographer Cristina De Middel pays homage to those taking the migration route from Central America to the USA. But what is real and what is not in her careful, mysterious images? Surely that person about to pole vault over Trump’s famed border wall is an invention?  South African photographer Lindokuhle Sobekwa trusts us with a disturbing family story: the sudden disappearance of his elder sister when he was just a little boy. Where did she go? What happened to her? It’s too traumatic not to be horribly real and Sobekwa uses new and found photography to deal with and share his pain. It’s too traumatic not to be horribly real Peruvian photographer Tarrah Krajnak also takes an autobiographical approach, but in a more poetic way,...

Leeds is another planet in this exhibition from veteran British photographer Peter Mitchell, a name nowhere near as well-known as contemporaries like Don McCullin or Martin Parr – but a truly worthwhile discovery if you’ve never heard of him. A Londoner who moved to Leeds in 1972 and never left, Mitchell’s photos in this small but transporting exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery take us on a tour of the backstreets and alleys of his adopted city, mainly during the 1970s, giving us proud shopkeepers and aproned artisans standing in front of crumbling premises, many of which look more Victorian or Edwardian than late-twentieth-century. Mitchell’s work – most of it in colour – has an unfussy, curious documentary appeal, all muted tones and small details like the lettering of shopfronts taking on a nostalgia four decades later. But there’s also playfulness. Someone once told Mitchell – now in his eighties – that his photos felt like they’d been taken by an alien visiting Earth. He turned that comment into a gag and interspersed actual NASA pictures of the surface of Mars among photos of timewarp shopfronts and ageing houses. He extends the joke by framing many of his works with faux-scientific ruled edges, turning all of Leeds into a lab rat. The captions, with their more modern references, including a reference to digital photos, were clearly written much later. They add another sense of time passing to the show.  He gives us utopia being shattered in front of our eyes...