Cold prism on Beirut's fire and fury
The four shortlisted artists for Britain's most prestigious and lucrative photography prize, with £30,000 for the winner, address issues familiar to millions around the world today.
Two conceptualists and two traditional photo-documentarists explore national identity and the individual's place in society in a refreshingly direct show.
Walid Raad's large monochrome photographs of his home town, Beirut, under attack, include men watching for Israeli planes and city explosions.
Raad exploits the smoke and pushes the printing to extremes of abstraction. His annotated photographs, based on a childhood compulsion to collect bullets, form a cold scientific record of their targets, which distances him from the situation.
Phillipe Chancel's (France) luminous prints of the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, are shockingly bright contradictions that life under dictators is monochrome.
A deceptively tranquil dining room, with an intense blue table, is the stage set for talks on Korea's nuclear programme; gorgeous Greek blues, fuschias and pinks suffuse everyday scenes.
Chancel's traditional photoessay conveys uniformity and regularity, but its scope was controlled. In contrast, Anders Petersen (Sweden) inhabits the underbelly of a French town, and his harsh, low-contrast images exaggerate gritty existences.
Fiona Tan (part-Indonesian, part European-Australian) explores her identity through strangers' experiences. Framed colour snaps from family albums in Vox Populi, Sydney, 2006, offer a compelling genetic profile and social history of Australia's population, and her accompanying video installation, The Changeling, 2006, is built from a nostalgically beautiful set of 1920s photographs of Japanese schoolgirls; from a parade of seemingly identical faces, distinctive identities emerge. Tan's gently thoughtful work, which deserves to win if Chancel's doesn't, closes an enthralling show.
Until 7 April. Information: 020 7831 1772; www.photonet.org.uk
Deutsche Borse Photography Prize
The Photographers' Gallery
Ramillies Street, W1F 7LW
