The irony age

‘Thanksgiving 1964’ (2009) by Roe Ethridge

This year’s shortlisted group of artists for the annual £30,000 Deutsche Börse photography prize is strong enough to make an engaging exhibition, although a peculiar one.

Two of the shortlisted four, Elad Lassry and Roe Ethridge, are concerned with breaking distinctions between photographic genres, which they now consider outmoded. Ethridge, an American, plays around with such things as studio portraiture, catalogue photography, parodies of old masters, advertising and the internet.

The Israeli photographer Lassry does something similar, but with more insistence on the equality of pictures. He is concerned with the question of what a 21st-century picture actually is. As he says in one of the excellent three-minute interviews on show in the gallery, he collects photographs. “When I photograph cucumbers, there isn’t any less engagement than when I photograph two sisters.” Sadly, there isn’t any more interest, either.

Both are knowing photographers who revel in ironic picture-making: one image that can stand for much of what they both do is Ethridge’s bowl of fruit in the manner of a Dutch still-life, although the fruit here is covered in a rich layer of mould. They each have a lot in common with artists such as Wolfgang Tillmans, Juergen Teller or Erwin Olaf, merrily criss-crossing between genres, and just as happy on commercial assignment as they are preparing museum shows. Both are fashionable, although neither has yet made much inroad into the collectors’ market (it is much harder to buy photographs ironically than it is to make them). They are like a pair of enjoyable punsters, joshing away with imagery in the same way a stand-up comedian works with words.

Thomas Demand, from Germany, is the best known of the artists here. This year, he is represented by a single photograph, mounted on an outsize, elaborate set of photographically reproduced curtaining. But one picture can’t easily represent a major exhibition. There are many more pictures included in the catalogue, which gives a fairer view of what the judges were trying to acknowledge in their shortlisting than the exhibition does.

Demand’s procedure is familiar. Trained as a sculptor, he makes elaborate life-size recreations of scenes from history or the news, using paper and card, and then photographs them. Demand has invented a way of bridging the gap between documentary and narrative. All his works started as “real” – real places, connected to a specific moment in time. But by abstracting them through his rebuilding, Demand gives them broader resonance. If he were a writer, this process would be normal: every novel is built from fragments of real life, processed and sequenced for larger meaning.

Demand’s single picture here is very striking but only after you have been given the key. In his interview, across the other side of the room and on a loop of tape that may well be 10 minutes or more from the passage you need, Demand is perfectly clear. The Heldenorgel (heroes’ organ) was made by veterans of the Great War in a little Austrian town, who once a day played a memorial to their lost comrades. After some 80 years, the municipality felt that this could be turned into a tourist attraction and proposed to automate it. Demand’s image is a recreation of a postcard of the workings of the organ, at the point when the real thing was dismantled. As he puts it: “I would reconstruct a memory of something which produces a memory on a daily basis.”

Finally, Magnum photographer Jim Goldberg is included for his exhibition, Open See, at the Photographers’ Gallery. Goldberg, like so many photographers, has got bored of the particular. He is working on books on big subjects, the displacement of people from war or other forced causes of economic migration. In the process, he is inevitably covering ground that many others have already worked on – hence the urge to be visibly different. It may be that such a project needs the formal constraints a book will provide but the work as seen at the Photographers’ Gallery was not far short of chaotic. It looked like the kind of imagery that any photographer would have on the pin-boards in the studio as he worked up his ideas. It did not add up to a finished exhibition.

Goldberg photographed displaced people in Greece, and moved further afield: we have Ukrainians and Senegalese and a picture on newpsrint from Bangladesh. Each is thrown on the wall in a deliberately irregular way. Pictures in many different formats and sizes, framed in many styles, were clustered together at a range of heights. Most are single portraits, often with writing on them, either the photographer’s or the sitters’. Nowhere is there an attempt at finding a style. The photographer never tries to show that his own manner is more important than the stories he is trying to tell, which is commendably moderate. On the other hand, he never makes his stories more telling by presenting them in a crafted coherent manner.

The stories that Goldberg brings us are certainly harrowing. Here are people sold for sex, tortured, crushed by poverty and disease. “My life is sick because of what they did to me” is Goldberg’s translation of what Ludva, from the Ukraine, wrote on her picture. The title of the exhibition itself, Open See, comes from a scrawled message in one of the photographs that echoes with the desperation of the search for elsewhere: “In the Open See Don’t Have Border”. One shocking, marvellous frame, “Demba’s Map”, contains a collaged account of one man’s odyssey around Africa, pinballing from one misery to another. Nowhere on the frame itself do you discover the most shocking detail of all: Demba Balde was a human trafficker and all our sympathy at the horrific details of his travels stop the moment we learn it.

Stylistically, these pictures are closer to the hand-wringing of “concerned” photographers such as Peter Beard than they are to the great tradition of clear-seeing that Magnum used to represent. There’s much to like about them and much to hesitate at. A bit like the whole show.

Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2011, Ambika P3, London, until May 1. deutsche-boerse.com