Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2005
The winner of the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2005 was announced on 11 May 2005. Luc Delahaye was awarded this major prize for contemporary photography
In its inaugural year the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2005 exhibition presented works by the four shortlisted photographers. It was shown at the Photographers’ Gallery in London, C/O Berlin and Deutsche Börse Group’s headquarters in Frankfurt.
The shortlist consisted of Luc Delahaye, JH Engström, Jörg Sasse and Stephen Shore. Delahaye received £30,000; the other shortlisted photographers were awarded £3,000 each.
The Jury
The final shortlist was announced in December 2004 by the Jury, chaired by Paul Wombell, Director of The Photographers’ Gallery. The other jury members were Anne-Marie Beckmann, Curator of the Art Collection Deutsche Börse (Frankfurt), Kate Bush, Editorial Director Contemporary Art and Photography, Phaidon Press (London), Rosa Olivares, Director, EXIT Magazine (Madrid), Christoph Ruys, Director, PhotoMuseum (Antwerp).
The Shortlist

Luc Delahaye
(b.1962, France) was selected for the exhibition Luc Delahaye-Photographs (5 February - 3 May 2004) at the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, Bradford. Delahaye’s work includes a series of monumentally sized panoramas that evoke the traditions of historic painting and also the compositions of mid-19th century war photography. Delahaye’s approach to representing the sites and aftermath of contemporary wars and civil unrest consciously determines an alternative to the conventions of photojournalism.

JH Engström
(b.1969, Sweden) JH Engström was selected for the publication Trying to Dance (Journal, 2004). The book confidently and imaginatively blends portraits of friends, interiors and evocative landscapes. Engström builds his pictorial momentum through mixing lyrical colour imagery with graphic, distressed, black and white photography. Trying to Dance powerfully conveys the sense of his emotive and subjective experiences of the people and places around him.

Jörg Sasse
(b. 1962, Germany) Rather than ‘taking’ photographs, Jörg Sasse, ‘finds’ them. The departure point for his enigmatic works are thousands of anonymous snapshots, which he searches individually. Sasse then works on the vernacular photographs that he is intuitively drawn to, often focussing in on a small detail within an image. He crops, saturates, blurs and pixelates the photographs he selects, creating new pictures but ones that have strange and yet familiar qualities to them. Sasse was nominated for the exhibition at Galerie Wilma Tolksdorf, Frankfurt, Germany (3 September - 3 November 2004).

Stephen Shore
(b. 1947, USA) was selected for his publication Uncommon Places: The Complete Works (Thames & Hudson, 2004). During the 1970s, Shore travelled across the United States, photographing street corners, diners, gas stations and motel rooms of ordinary America – environments that were curious and strangely alien to the New York based Shore. Uncommon Places was first published in 1982. At the same time, Shore reassessed and increased the scope of the body of work to include previously unseen works. This reflects the influence on the directions of conceptual colour photography that Stephen Shore’s photography continues to hold.