Mirror, mirror on the wall – it is not only in fairy tales that mirrors sometimes mix up real and fictitious realities.

What the viewer and, conversely, the reflecting surface “see” is a question of individual perception on the one hand and of light on the other.

The proximity to photography, to “writing with light”, is obvious here and is almost symbolically emphasized in the works of the American photographer Deana Lawson.

Christian Riethmuller

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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Lawson, who works as a professor of fine arts at Princeton University, always presents her large-format photographs, which are in the tradition of the documentary, in mirrored frames that absorb and reflect the light in the room in different ways.

The viewer's point of view changes, imperceptibly at first, while dealing with Lawson's motifs reveals a fascinating play with realities.

The connection between everyday life and dream world 

While the photographs initially look like portraits of black people in their homes, what catches the eye is anything but randomly arranged objects or decorative elements, suggesting that the rooms were designed very deliberately and as references to various aspects of black culture and its myths in America to serve.

In this way Lawson combines the reality of everyday life with dream worlds and at the same time documents the black diaspora.

Her works were exhibited at the Kunsthalle Basel in 2020 under the title “Centropy”.

For this show, the American artist was awarded the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2022, which the Deutsche Börse Art Foundation and the renowned Photographer's Gallery in London have been awarding for many years.

A selection of Lawson's photographs is now on display at The Cube, the headquarters of the Boerse in Eschborn, along with impressive work by three other finalists in the Photo Prize competition - Gilles Peress, Jo Ratcliffe and Anastasia Samoylova.

Like Lawson, they deal with current issues of our time, but choose very different visual approaches.

Photographs that tell a story

Samoylova's extensive photo series "FloodZone", for example, revels in the pastel colors of Miami, a color scheme that is almost iconographic for the Florida city, but her motifs point bluntly to the consequences of climate change, which not only threatens Miami with devastating hurricanes, but also the Architectural sins of faulty urban planning exposed, while billboards still praise the tropical paradise.

Last but not least, the staged worlds of images in glossy magazines contribute to its powerful reputation, which the artist, who was born and raised in Moscow but now lives in America, cleverly exposes with her photographs.

A dream landscape in the touristic sense is also Jo Ratcliffe's preferred field of work, whereby the South African does not conceive her landscape photographs for travel magazines or magnificent colored volumes, but stands in the tradition of social documentary photography.

In her publication "Photographs 1980s - now", which was nominated for the award, she has brought together works from various work complexes into a retrospective in which her photos serve more as points of association than as direct documentation of the often violent history of South Africa over the past 40 years.

In her landscapes, mostly shot with black and white film, a person can only rarely be made out, here and there an animal roams through the barren terrain full of abandoned buildings,

It's worth looking

The trauma of a country is also the subject of French photographer Gilles Peress, who was nominated for his publication Whatever You Say, Say Nothing.

The massive work, a two-volume illustrated book and an accompanying almanac with a total of more than 2000 pages, documents Peress' years of preoccupation with the Northern Ireland conflict, compressed into 22 "semi-fictional days", including days of struggle, days of internment and days when nothing happened.

With their help, he describes a conflict from the dual perspective of Protestants and Catholics, which is representative of all the conflicts in the world that are actually insoluble.

In addition to the four finalists for the photo prize, the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation is showing groups of works by ten artists that it has recently acquired for the collection.

These include iconic works by photography legends such as Walker Evans and Tom Wood, but also positions by young artists such as Maisie Cousins ​​and Verdiana Albano, a graduate of the Offenbach University of Design.

They all offer a view of the world that is worth taking a closer look at.

Fictional and true realities could be mixed up.

The exhibition can be seen at The Cube, Mergenthalerallee 61, in Eschborn until September 25th.

On "Open Saturday" on September 10, it can be viewed from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. without prior registration.

The visit is also possible as part of a guided tour with prior registration at www.deutscheboersephotographyfoundation.org.