American photographer Jim Goldberg was awarded the 2011 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize today in a ceremony at Ambika P3, University of Westminster, London, the temporary home of The Photographers’ Gallery, which is undergoing renovation. The £30,000 ($49,443) prize, founded in 1996 and administered by The Photographers’ Gallery, is awarded to a living photographer who has made the most significant contribution to photography in Europe in the past year. This is the 15th year the prize has been given out.
Goldberg was nominated for his exhibition Open See at The Photographers’ Gallery, London. For Open See, Goldberg photographed refugee, immigrant and trafficked populations using large- and medium-format cameras, and Polaroids. Goldberg then embellished the images with the handwritten stories of his subjects or with ephemera, and also incorporated video into his storytelling technique. The Photographers’ Gallery director, Brett Rogers, who was the non-voting chair, said in a statement that the award recognized Goldberg’s “timely and inventive approach to documentary practice, at the heart of which lies for him co-authorship, a form of creative collaboration allowing these individuals to tell their own stories.”
The other three shortlisted photographers were:
German artist Thomas Demand was nominated for his exhibition Nationalgalerie at Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. For the exhibition, Demand built and photographed life-sized paper models that were constructed using news, personal and other images as a reference. The work, which focuses on German social and political life, emphasizes and questions the photograph’s role in constructing the viewer’s sense of reality.
American artist Roe Etheridge was nominated for his solo exhibition at Les Rencontres d’Arles in France. Etheridge, also considered a conceptual photographer, utilizes photographic forms such as commercial outtakes, still life, landscape and studio portraiture, grouping seemingly unrelated images together to create new associations between widely practiced modes of photography.
