The 2021 Deutsche Börse Photography prize sheds light on global issues – and on the future of photography itself

Cao Fei, Nova, 2019 (Courtesy of artist, Vitamin Creative Space and Sprüth Magers)

The prestigious annual Deutsche Börse Photography prize exhibition opened at London’s Photographers’ Gallery this week with a typically diverse set of work. Technology in China, development in Mexico, indigenous rights in India and migration in Europe are all themes touched upon in the 2021 show.

This year though, all four nominees are not solely photographers in a traditional sense, but multidisciplinary artists who use photographs as just one element of their deeply researched projects, all of which straddle the line between documentary and fine art.

Previous prize winners have included photography giants Juergen Teller and Richard Billingham. But this year’s nominees indicate the prize is moving towards an expanded view of photography, examining how the medium interacts with video, text and installation.

“Celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize in 2021, it seems especially timely, as the world begins to take stock, that we consider what a possible shared future might be,” says Anna Dannemann, senior curator at The Photographers’ Gallery. “This year’s shortlisted projects offer some insight into what we have to overcome to create a more equal and sustainable society, and reflects upon the issues we urgently need to face.”

“Poulomi Basu, Alejandro Cartagena, Cao Fei and Zineb Sedira have each created exceptional, multilayered and extremely relevant bodies of work. Presented here in four distinct artists rooms, the selected projects all address contemporary social, political and environmental issues in often unexpected ways using photography, installation and other media.”

The winner of the £30,000 prize will be announced at a special award ceremony held at The Photographers’ Gallery on 9 September.

Poulomi Basu (nominated for her book ‘Centralia’ published by Dewi Lewis Publishing in 2020)

Since 2004, the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army, a banned Maoist revolutionary group, has been fighting for the rights of central India’s indigenous people (although similar movements have existed for decades). It is thought that women make up at least half of its armed forces, who have been known to carry out attacks on Indian state politicians and personnel to resist the industrialisation of mineral-rich tribal jungles.

Poulomi Basu, an Indian transmedia artist, photographer and activist has documented this underreported conflict on her own terms. Rejecting the model for traditional news photojournalism, she has instead drawn from literary and cinematic influences such as William Faulkner and David Lynch to foreground her subjective view. Centralia is a non-linear mix of staged and documentary photographs, alongside brutal crime scene photos and mugshots of the revolutionary fighters.

From Centralia by Poulomi Basu (© Poulomi Basu. Courtesy of the artist)

From Centralia by Poulomi Basu (© Poulomi Basu. Courtesy of the artist)

From Centralia by Poulomi Basu (© Poulomi Basu. Courtesy of the artist)

“Instead of making myself the sole arbiter and the moral authority over this story, I decided to invite other voices into the book which is the voices of the women, female guerrillas, their narratives, and invite the narratives of the tribal activists and journalists,” Basu says.

“My photographs sort of sit within these different voices that I invited inside the book to create a holistic narrative and some form of understanding of the clash of perspectives that exist within this place and try to give the audience their own tools and methods of figuring out what the story is.”

Alejandro Cartagena (nominated for his book ‘A Small Guide to Homeownership’ published by The Velvet Cell in 2020)

Mimicking the style of How to...? guide books, A Small Guide to Homeownership collects over a decade of Cartagena’s work examining urbanisation in northern Mexico. Combining landscapes, old advertisements, portraits, and documentary photography, Cartagena looks at the impact of the Mexican adoption of the USA’s urban development policies from the 1960s onwards.

From A Small Guide to Homeownership, 2020, by Alejandro Cartagena Escobedo (© Alejandro Cartagena. Courtesy of the artist)

Man digging a hole from A Small Guide to Homeownership, 2020, by Alejandro Cartagena Escobedo (© Alejandro Cartagena. Courtesy of the artist)

Apodaca from A Small Guide to Homeownership, 2020, by Alejandro Cartagena (© Alejandro Cartagena. Courtesy of the artist)

“I had seen how the Monterrey metropolitan area was changing into this suburbanised landscape and I would go out to the peripheries of the metro area and photograph, always finding in those landscapes little houses appearing in the middle of nowhere,” says Cartagena. “That created an opportunity to think ‘Why is this happening? Why is my landscape changing so rapidly around me?’ And that led me to a rabbit hole of almost ten years of documenting not only that that can be seen but asking ‘Why are those things there?’”

The surreal images present the environmental and cultural incongruity of new suburban developments in the landscape, and the environmental problems they cause. The book also looks at the human impact of housing policy, following a number of Mexicans as they struggle with the bureaucracy of home ownership copied from the blueprint of the suburban American dream.

Cao Fei (nominated for her exhibition Blueprints at Serpentine Gallery, London)

In her 2020 Serpentine exhibition Blueprints, Chinese artist Cao Fei combined photography with VR, film, performance and installation to explore technology, consumerism and the human condition in her mother country.

Cao Fei, Nova, 2019 (© Cao Fei. Courtesy of artist, Vitamin Creative Space and Sprüth Magers)

Cao Fei, Nova, 2019 (© Cao Fei. Courtesy of artist, Vitamin Creative Space and Sprüth Magers)

Cao Fei, Nova, 2019 (© Cao Fei Courtesy of artist, Vitamin Creative Space and Sprüth Magers)

Her multi-channel work constructs dystopian fictions in which these themes are heightened and sometimes subverted, looking at how technology shapes our reality – and how we can take these new tools and use them for our own ends.

Despite the futuristic technologies and visuals on display, Fei has described it as an “alternative document for the history of technology in China,” reflecting her interest in the slippage of time and space that technology can simulate.

Zineb Sedira (nominated for her exhibition A Brief Moment at Jeu de Paume, Paris)

London-based French artist Zineb Sedira’s major retrospective in Paris, A Brief Moment, followed her work from 1998 to the present day. Using her own family experience of migration between Algiers, France and the UK, she uses photography, installation and film to create immersive projects that explore identity, memory, gender and environment. The exhibition included a set of Sedira’s living room, inspired by the 1969 Pan-African Festival of Algiers and the revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s, with its autobiographical cultural ethos.

Zineb Sedira, Way of Life, 2019 (© Zineb Sedira. Courtesy of the artist and Kamel Mennour, Paris)

For a Brief Moment the World was on Fire, 2019 (© Zineb Sedira. Courtesy of the artist and Kamel Mennour, Paris)

Zineb Sedira, Way of Life, 2019 (© Zineb Sedira. Courtesy of the artist and Kamel Mennour, Paris)

The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2021 Exhibition opens at The Photographers’ Gallery, London from 25 June until 26 September 2021