Pure force of youth in Jerwoods
The Jerwood Photography Awards exist to recognise promising recent photography graduates; the reward to the five winners on show here will be follow-up commitment to their burgeoning careers. Quietly surprising, the Jerwoods always encapsulate new trends at photography’s border with fine art.
This year’s selection roughly divides into two themes, childhood and empowerment, but Nicky Walsh’s Untitled series stands apart as a set of cool near-abstracts that convert mundane details in an office into misty impressionistic studies evoking Uta Barth’s beautiful, painterly photographs.
Kurt Tong’s reinterpretations of childhood in People’s Park is a nostalgic stroll through Guangzhou’s abandoned public spaces.
He successfully superimposes his own nostalgia onto the sad reality of overgrown corners inhabited by birds. Martina Lindqvist’s Ragskar Island, set in Finland, is a more sombre replay of her past, with darkly brooding landscapes and close-ups of shorelines recreated as models from family snaps, photographed against blown-up originals, but leaving the questions unanswered.
The concept of empowerment is picked up by Alice Myers’s Rocket (children swimming) and James Pogson’s Ladykillers (young female boxers). Myers shoots from above and her title describes the shapes created by bodies being propelled through water.
Beautifully simple and bright, they exude a vitality and freedom and capture how such movement can explode the blueness into spectral, expressionistic patterns.
Floating head down, the children represent the almost mystical faith required to swim — and move through life.
On that theme, Ladykillers is a parade of boxers posing in shorts, vests and gloves, some wearing winners’ sashes. Their hard or incongruously girly, proud, defiant and smug red faces contrast with the gaiety of the kit, and almost distract from the punch-flushed arms and swollen eyelids — their badges of honour in this masculine world.
Until 11 December. Information: 020 7654 0171; www.jerwoodspace.co.uk
Jerwood Photography Awards 2008
Jerwood Space
Union Street, SE1 0LN
