T h e   P h o t o g r a p h e r s '   G a l l e r y

D e u t s c h e   B ö r s e   P h o t o g r a p h y   P r i z e   2 0 0 9 

On the 06/03/2009 as part of my discourse unit at UEL I visited the Photographers' Gallery in central London, the idea behind the visit was to look at the Photographic work of the four nominees up for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize.

Those Nominee's were;

• Taryn Simon nominated for her work 'An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar.
• Tod Papageorge nominated for the exhibition 'Passing Through Eden' - Photographs of Central Park, NY.
• Emily Jacir nominated for her work 'Material for a Film'
• Paul Graham nominated for his work 'A Shimmer of Possibility' 

I generally enjoyed the visit to the Photographers' Gallery, I liked viewing the work by Taryn Simon and Tod Papageorge I felt both their sets of photographs were very striking and generated a lot of emotion within me. 

I loved the simplicity of Papageorge's passing through eden photographs, in particular the photograph I have included above in my blog, it struck me as such a simple yet perfect photograph, everything from the composition of the man to the baby is shot perfectly. 

Another photograph that struck me quite a lot was the photograph of the inbred 'White Tiger', upon seeing the photograph for the first time I thought it may have been digitally manipulated as it didn't look physically possible to have a white tiger look that way, however after reading Simon's information by the side of the photograph I understood that this photograph was in fact real.

I felt really taken aback that this was actually real, I spent a lot of time still in shock that someone could over bread Tigers for the money and end up just creating something that looks Alien and never fitted its intended purpose anyway.However as a photograph I do think its fantastic, its iconic to me because it brought to light an issue I never even knew of. I don't feel in my opinion there is anything technically brilliant about the photograph however just the idea of photographing such a horrific subject makes a brilliant photograph in itself.

In my opinion Tod Papageorge should win the prize, I felt because his work had been produced over a very long period and each and every photograph was as beautiful as the next in such a consistent way. I feel that none of the other photographers exhibitions delivered like Tod Papageorge's did.