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, fusing performance with photography. In images which span several years of her work, Krajnak appears, either re-creating the poses of women in past images or communing with rocks and recording her thoughts and feelings in accompanying notes. Her work is the most elusive of the four here, but there’s a rawness that lingers.
Faith in culture and history is communicated strongly by USA photographer Rahim Fortune’s beautiful black-and-white images of people, places and rituals across the American South. There’s an immediate political reality at the table here, and Fortune’s work feels like it honours resilience and continuity in the Black American experience. There’s hope, too, in his focus on youth, and a sense of long-term endurance in the face of short-term pain. Right now, it’s welcome and soothing.
