New Zealand artist Luke Willis Thompson has won the annual Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize for his filmic portrait of Diamond Reynolds, who witnessed the shooting of her partner (Philando Castile) by police in Minnesota in 2016. A collaboration between Reynolds and Thompson, the film titled Autoportrait 2017) was first shown at Chisenhale Gallery, London, and made in contrast to the original media footage Reynolds recorded on her phone during the immediate aftermath of her partner’s death. Selected from a shortlist of four artists, Thompson will receive £30,000. Brett Rogers, director of The Photographer’s Gallery, said in a statement: ‘His singular and uncompromising portrait, made in collaboration with its subject, Diamond Reynolds, was conceived as a way to return agency to the protagonist… the project was felt to invite a timely and prescient conversation around the nature of image control, authorship and distribution in a way that expands rather than shuts down the debate.’ Thompson is also a nominee for the 2018 Turner Prize, the winner of which will be announced in December.
The shortlisted artists also included Mathieu Asselin (nominated for the series Monsanto: A Photographic Investigation, a research project on the global biotechnology corporation); Rafal Milach (nominated for his exhibition Refusal at Atlas Sztuki Gallery in Lodz, Poland, on systems of control and the manipulations of ideology employed by the governments of post-Soviet countries) and Batia Suter (nominated for her publication Parallel Encyclopedia #2, a compilation of about 1000 images found in publications).
The jury for this year’s award comprised Anne-Marie Beckmann (director of Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation; Duncan Forbes, curator and visiting research Fellow at Westminster University; artist, curator and editor Gordon MacDonald and artist Penelope Umbrico.
The four projects are currently on show at The Photographers’ Gallery through 3 June.
