Picture credit: Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin
Oliver Chanarin, from the UK, and South African-born Adam Broomberg triumphed with images focusing on the ‘War on Terror’.
Their images run alongside the work of German poet Bertolt Brecht in a project entitled War Primer 2, a book published in 2011 as a modern day version of Brecht’s 1955 publication, War Primer.
A spokesman for the Photographer’s Gallery, which organises the annual competition, said: ‘Sifting through the internet for low resolution screen-grabs and mobile phone images, the artists then combined them to resonate with Brecht’s poems.’
‘Through the layering of photographic history, Broomberg and Chanarin offer a critique of photographs of contemporary conflict and their dissemination – a theme that has been at the centre of their practice for 15 years.’
Judges praised the pair for the way they ‘pushed the boundaries of the medium, exploring the complex relationship between image and text while drawing on elements from both the past history of photography and the present image economy’.
The Deutsche Börse Photography Prize was awarded to a photographer who had made a ‘significant contribution to the medium of photography either through an exhibition or publication, in Europe between October 2011 and 30 September 2012′.
