Meet the finalists of the 2022 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize

Every year without fail, the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize has drawn our attention to photographers offering unique perspectives on the most crucial issues of the current moment. Throughout its 26-year history, this influential award has platformed a range of artists who may be divergent in their background, their approach, and their themes, but are united in their shared commitments to sensitively excavating their distinct and complex realities. 

While this year’s winner is yet to be announced, the work of the four nominated artists – Deana Lawson, Gilles Peress, Jo Ractliffe, and Anastasia Samoylova – will go on display at The Photographers’ Gallery later this month. “The four nominated artists embody very distinctive approaches to visual storytelling. Collectively, they are grappling with some of our most urgent issues – thinking through and offering challenging perspectives on the representation of conflict, and its aftermath; on climate catastrophe, and on the links that bind us across generations and dispersed geographies,” Katrina Schwarz, the exhibition’s curator, tells Dazed. “Each artist is rigorous and idiosyncratic in their approach – demonstrating an acute awareness of their context, their relationship to history and to language – visual or otherwise – and a responsibility to address their own position in relation to their subject.”

Deana Lawson, who is nominated for her exhibition Centropy which took place at Kunsthalle Basel in 2021, is best known for her formally composed yet intimate depictions of Black bodies in both public and private life. Schwarz explains, “She has a reverence for intergenerational connectivity within Black culture and describes her subjects as forming an ever-expanding mythological extended family. This body of work continues Lawson’s exploration of – and challenge to – conventional representations of Black life. Centropy is Deana Lawson’s most direct pronouncement of her abiding interest in the sacred and celestial.” At the upcoming Photographer’s Gallery Exhibition, her large-scale photographic works are set in grand frames constructed from mirrored glass. Schwarz says: “Holograms and images of sublime natural phenomena, such as galaxies and tilting waterfalls, heighten this sense of the cosmic.”

Gilles Peress Whatever You Say, Say Nothing is described by Schwarz as “a publication of monumental ambition and complexity”. Exploring the conflict in Northern Ireland, this vast work of staggering scope spans 2000 pages, including 1295 images across two volumes alongside an accompanying almanac of contextual material. Schwarz tells us: “Peress is testing the limits of photography to record and understand conflict and to this end, he employs the unique structure of organising the photographs across 22 semi-fictional days.” The gallery will feature large-scale installations of his work, recalling the representation of conflict in the murals of Derry and Belfast, and the walls strewn with graffiti and bullet holes. 

“The four nominated artists embody very distinctive approaches to visual storytelling. Collectively, they are grappling with some of our most urgent issues – thinking through and offering challenging perspectives on the representation of conflict, and its aftermath; on climate catastrophe, and on the links that bind us across generations and dispersed geographies” – Katrina Schwarz

For more than three decades, Jo Ractliffe has documented the landscape of South Africa. Schwarz tells us: “Ractliffe bears witness to the complexities of a country scarred by the violence of Apartheid, as well as the aftermath of civil war in neighbouring Angola.” Her seminal work Photographs 1980s–now is a comprehensive visual account of the country’s traumatic past, comprised of major photo essays alongside early works and newly-published images. “Jo Ractliffe’s stark images are set apart from social documentary. She is drawn to quiet poetics, not direct political address,” says Schwarz of this haunting imagery. “Her visual language is distinctive – it is marked by desolation and absence but, as sites of massacre, of forced removal and violence – these images are neither silent nor empty.”

FloodZone is Anastasia Samoylova’s ongoing photographic series exploring environmental changes in America’s coastal cities, with a particular focus on Florida, the photographer‘s home since 2016. “Samoylova has a particular eye for the dissonance between constructed and natural landscapes, capturing the dissonance between paradise and catastrophe… the colour palette may be tropical and pastel-pretty, but there is peril too,” says Schwarz. Samoylova’s images tell a story of cityscapes encroached upon by the natural world as Miami’s aspirational, art deco buildings begin to reveal signs of the increasingly calamitous situation we seem to be moving inexorably towards. “Dynamic geometry and bold colour on the gallery walls reflect the tools used by advertisers and developers in Florida. It is a dazzling kaleidoscope that aims to seduce and disorient the viewer.” 

Take a look at the gallery above for a glimpse of the work of each photographer nominated for The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2022.

The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2022 exhibition will be on display at The Photographers' Gallery, London from March 25 until June 12 2022, with the winner announced on May 12 2022