- My Account
- Logout
- Register
- Login
Lyrical images that haunt and provoke
Related Articles
09 November 2007
If photography is today's punk rock - the DIY art-form that everyone can practise - the Jerwood Prize is modern classical music. Its winners - UK-based Visual Arts graduates - receive £2,500 each, and present fresh, weighty stories enveloped in deceptively beautiful guises.
Edmund Kevill-Davies's Puppet Love is suffused in the bright colours of seaside postcards appropriate for the ventriloquists' dummies he poses in static family portraits, an eerie take on family relationships.
The other four exhibitors represent the new photo-journalism: less explicit, more lyrical than the Magnum school. Kevin Newark's Protoplasm is a series of still lifes of plastic bags floating in London canals. They resemble spectral jellyfish but represent environmental disaster. Similarly, Sophie Gerard's E-wasteland studies of dumped electronics in India. She finds gorgeous autumnal colours in rusting circuit boards and iridescence in toxic puddles that boys run through in sandals.
Dana Popa's Not Natasha applies an artful touch to a study of Moldavian girls who escaped the sex industry. In hauntingly quiet vignettes, she depicts a girl whose mother sold her into prostitution pinned down by depression on her bed, and another lying under a sheet in a gynaecological ward, exposing only a cascade of hair.
The mood lightens with Moira Lovell's After School Club, which cruelly dresses adult waitresses in school ties and suspenders outside their alma maters.
A quietly provocative exhibition whose messages are delivered with light hands and artists' brushes, it leaves stark messages hanging - like those plastic bags.
Until 9 December (0131 220 1911, www.jerwoodvisualarts.org).
Jerwood Photography Awards 2007
Jerwood Space
Union Street, SE1 0LN
Comments
Top stories in Arts
Top stories in Arts
-
Chelsea Champions League celebrations - in pictures
-
Jessica Ennis blasts 'massive, massive mess-up' after discovering run is one hurdle short
-
Cannes Film Festival - in pictures
-
News pictures of the day
-
Didier Drogba to swap one football-mad billionaire for another: Chelsea star set for move to China
-
Baroness Warsi: Some Pakistani men think young white girls are "fair game" for sex abuse
-
'Death threat' at London 2012 Olympics borough council meeting
-
Gang stabs football fan to death after Chelsea FC win Champions League - and father is knifed as he runs to help
-
'Not from the same species': North London park stalker Ali Koc was raging after having benefit cut off
-
British banks hit by crisis as Spanish savers withdraw cash in euro crisis
-
Public enemies: why Prince Harry and Pippa Middleton's favourite nightclub has closed
-
Baroness Warsi: Some Pakistani men think young white girls are "fair game" for sex abuse
-
London's latest Banksy: graffiti artist's new work gets protection
-
Video: Random act of kindness cyclist says he could not stand by and watch homeless man rummage through bin for food -
London's hip new villages, uncovered
The O2
Check out the cool stuff happening under our tent such as the hottest gigs, comedy, sport, films, clubs, bars, restaurants and much more.
Can you imagine a career in teaching?
Be inspired to teach - let real teachers show you how rewarding the job can be.
Playing a game-changing role during the Games
Cisco is providing the solutions for London 2012's complex IT needs.
Win a Silverstone track day with Zantac 75
Feel the burn of a different kind - 20 Silverstone motoring experiences to be won
Reader Offers email A fantastic selection of
offers, giveaways and
promotions.