Thought photography was about taking photographs? Think again

This year’s Deutsche Börse Prize sees four artists deconstructing the medium of photography, and even finding it culpable, writes Mark Hudson

‘Centralia’ by Poulomi Basu, which is competing for the Deutsche Börse Prize (Press)

In a world where, as we’re endlessly reminded, “everyone is a photographer”, where even our elderly relatives are posting quirky images that can pass for “experimental photography” (and more power to them), what is there left for the actual professional experimental photographer to do? Nothing so mundane as simply taking a photograph, judging by recent exhibitions of the Deutsche Börse Prize, the Turner Prize of photography, celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. With short-listed artists regularly exhibiting films, books and archival installations, to which they’ve often made no physical contribution themselves, it’s as though today’s photographers (or “artists working with photography”, as they would no doubt prefer to call themselves) no longer regard the single, inalienably powerful, self-created image – which most of us still think of as the mainstay of photography – as a valid or even an achievable aim.

Chinese artist Cao Fei, shortlisted for her recent Serpentine Gallery exhibition, in which she was described as “working with video, digital media, sculptural installation and performance” (no mention of photography as such), presents an hour-long feature film set in a future where digital reality and actual reality have become vastly more merged than they are now. Shot largely on neon-lit sound stages, so it’s often weirdly reminiscent of classic Hollywood musicals, Nova is visually extraordinary, and represents a contemporary art world in which traditional media (painting and sculpture), film, performance and photography have become interchangeable activities. But since this is a photography exhibition, in the Photographers’ Gallery, it seems only right to give precedence to the still images. And while they are often beautiful – an exquisitely lit image of a spaceman on a beach lingers hauntingly in the mind – they don’t have a fully independent existence apart from the film.

Mexican photographer Alejandro Cartagena, shortlisted for his book on the “suburbanisation” of north-eastern Mexico, A Small Guide to Homeownership, is represented with wall-filling images of immense housing estates and spreads from the book which sardonically collage wide-eyed advertising material aimed at first-time buyers with images of the stark realities for lower-class Mexicans who take that path. The photographic image itself is culpable, he seems to argue, in the selling of an American-inspired middle-class lifestyle dream that poor Mexicans will never achieve. Yet Cartagena’s own images of Mexico’s embattled suburbanites have a respect and affection for their subjects, for ordinary people trying to make a better life for themselves in these vast rabbit-hutch projects, which brings to mind great Depression-era documentary snappers such as Walker Evans. Cartagena may feel obliged to brutally deconstruct the photographic process, but at heart he seems strongly bound to one of its best traditions.