Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2012

The winner of the annual Deutsche Börse Photography Prize was announced on Tuesday 3 September 2012: John Stezaker. Other photographers, who were shortlisted for this year’s prize, were: Pieter Hugo, Rinko Kawauchi and Christopher Williams. The price is presented by The Photographers’ Gallery, London. Work by the shortlisted photographers will be shown in an exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery, Summer 2012, followed by its presentations at the Deutsche Börse headquarters in Eschborn (14 September - 31 October) and and at C/O Berlin, Forum for visual dialogs.

The Jury

The members of the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2012 jury are: François Hébel (Director, Les Rencontres d'Arles), Martin Parr (artist, UK), Beatrix Ruf (Director/Curator, Kunsthalle Zürich) and Anne-Marie Beckmann (Curator, Art Collection Deutsche Börse, Germany). Brett Rogers, Director of The Photographers’ Gallery, is the non-voting Chair.

The Shortlist

Pieter Hugo, Yakubu Al Hasan, Agbogbloshie Market, Accra, Ghana 2009

Pieter Hugo

(born 1976, South-Africa) is nominated for his publication Permanent Error, published by Prestel (Germany, 2011).
Permanent Error (2011), Pieter Hugo’s latest publication, centres on a vast dumping ground for technological waste on the outskirts of Ghana’s capital city. Focusing on the young slum-dwellers who are burning the discarded, industrial rubbish to survive, Hugo’s stark photographs of this bleak landscape expose the consequences and ethics of disposal of the West’s consumption of ever-new technology.

Untitled from the series 'Illuminance', 2009

Rinko Kawauchi

(born 1972, Japan) is nominated for her publication Illuminance, published by Kehrer (Germany, 2011).
In her work, Rinko Kawauchi creates an imaginary space where the fantastical is possible – evoking moments of dreams, memory and temporality. The images in her book Illuminance (2011), the results of both commissions and personal projects, span fifteen years of her practice and have the ability to turn the mundane into the extraordinary and poetic.

John Stezaker, Marriage (Film Portrait Collage) XLIII 2007, (C) John Stezaker

John Stezaker

(born 1949, UK) is nominated for his exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (29 January – 18 March 2011).
Spanning more than 40 years, John Stezaker’s collages re-examine the multi-facetted relationships we have to the photographic image. Through his elegant and often perplexing juxtapositions of appropriated images found in books, magazines, and postcards, Stezaker adopts the content and contexts of the original images to convey his own witty and poignant meanings.

Bergische Bauernscheune, Junkersholz, Leichlingen, September 29th, 2009

Christopher Williams

(born 1956, USA) is nominated for his exhibition Kapitalistischer Realismus at Dům umění České Budějovice, Budweis, Czech Republic (5 May – 12 June 2011).
As much conceptual artist as photographer, Christopher Williams has been creating images of cameras, models, vehicles and other technical apparatus for the last 40 years. Alluding to and borrowing from the world of commercial photography he continuously questions what can constitute a photograph and how much the actual visual content of that photograph matters.