The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize exhibition and touring details have been announced for 2017. The annual award, established in 1996, awards one living photographer £30,000 for any body of work in an exhibition or publication format, selected for its contributions to the medium.

This year’s shortlisted artists comprise Sophie Calle, Dana Lixenberg, Awoiska van der Molen and Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs, whose entries offer innovative responses to documentary, landscape and portraiture, and will be displayed on the 4th and 5th floors of The Photographers’ Gallery this spring.

Amsterdam-born Dana Lixenberg’s (b. 1964) Imperial Courts (2015) is the result of longstanding research into  the mainly African-American neighbourhood housing project in Watts, Los Angeles. As a community that is battling with economic, political and social issues such as poverty, high unemployment and gang violence, the multi-faceted images shed light on modern day segregation and the journeys of individual stories across decades.

Nominated for the exhibition titled EURASIA at Fotomuseum Winterthur (2015-2016), Taiyo Onorato’s and Nico Krebs’ The Great Unreal (2008) questions the role of the iconic American road trip a global influence, embarking on a lesser-known, lesser-photographed region between Central Asia and Europe. The three-year journey, spanning 17, 000 kilometres encompassed travelling from Zurich all the way to Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia, through the Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. The duo came across landscapes and populations going in a state of flux and transition, from tradition to hyper-capitalism and globalisation. They subsequently digitally inserted objects related to the regions and merged different layers, to combine fiction with documentation.

Sophie Calle’s (b. 1953) most recent work, My mother, my cat, my father, in that order will be shown for the first time in London, dealing with close relationships and the notion of dealing with grief. Each project records an interaction with the world through memory and vulnerability.

Awoiska van der Molen’s (b. 1972) black and white abstracted images of unfamiliar landscapes explore the identity of place and their corresponding emotional and physical qualities. First presented as part of Blanco at FOAM, Amsterdam, the works traverse different sizes and formats, whilst encountering personal experiences with surroundings.

The winner is announced during at an award ceremony on 18 May.

The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, 3 March – 11 June, The Photographers’ Gallery, London. The exhibition tours to the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, from 29 June to 17 September and then to Aperture Foundation, New, York 15 November – 11 January 2018, also the first opportunity for the prize to be hosted in the US for 20 years.

For more information: www.thephotographersgallery.org.uk

Credits:
1. North Pole, 2009 © Sophie Calle Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Perrotin