Nominated and introduced by David Campany

Polly Braden
Polly Braden has been photographing the minutiae of life in China’s swelling cities for the best part of a decade. She shuns the epic scenes of grandeur and squalour that have become standard in contemporary art and the news. Instead she pursues the everyday - the slightest, lightest of gestures; fleeting expressions and chance encounters.  The images were made across China: from Shanghai and Beijing in the east, Xiamen towards the south, and Kunming and Shenzhen in the west. Real people living actual lives, not crude metaphors for a whole nation or an ideology. Is it possible to notice and make images of such things in a way that hints at the profound changes the country is undergoing? This is Braden’s constant question.  She presents here a sample of this unique body of work, in advance of a book to be published in the Spring.

Polly Braden / Homeless in army uniform / 2009 / C41 Print /
60 x 90 cm / Courtesy of the artist

Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin
Broomberg & Chanarin tend to focus on sites of conflict and political struggle but they have a deep interest in archives of all kinds. How are they constructed? What meanings do they house? Who uses them?

In Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining Jack Nicholson plays a writer who takes his wife and son to an out of season hotel where he plans to complete his novel. Day after day he shuts himself away and writes. But slowly, haunted by the hotel’s past he loses his mind and turns murderous. His wife sneaks into his room, approaches the typewriter only to find all he has written is the same sentence over and over: ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.’ The new Stanley Kubrick Archive here in London includes the hundreds of pages the director had his secretary type for the scene - even in foreign languages - for the film’s global distribution. Broomberg & Chanarin have made actual size photographs of a sample of these pages. Their camera stares baffled, shocked and fascinated at the endless labour and repetition. 

Jason Evans
Jason Evans is one of the most inventive image-makers at work today. He is known for his idiosyncratic fashion and music photography, but all his pictures are informed by his constant curiosity about the medium itself - the way it renders light, colour, texture, objects and space. His latest work is a series of improvised sculptures made from about-to-be-thrown-away materials moulded and metamorphosed by the subtlest of light.  We may see a family resemblance to the ‘sculpture as photo’ so familiar to contemporary art, but in truth there are traces of deep affection for photography’s eternal love affair with the dramas of light and form, and its perplexing ability to place us in a realm somewhere between image and object. It sounds unavoidably pretentious in words but Evans’ pictures carry off this kind of metamorphosis with the joy and aplomb of a good close-up magic trick. And they induce a pondering smile that only photography can.