Review by Donna Gottschalk and Helene Giannicini / Deutsche Börse – Pictures that irritate, deceive and move you deeply | Deutsche Börse Photography Award

WWhen Donna Gottschalk announced to her mother that she was gay, she responded, “You have chosen a difficult path.” It was New York in the 1960s, where homosexuality was illegal, and as the photographer reflects in a video included in her new exhibition “The Other Us”: “There were no happy gays.” The show opens with a photograph of Gottschalk’s mother in the beauty salon she ran in the notorious crime metropolis of Alphabet City, where the images are accompanied by texts by French writer Hélène Giannicini, recording the photographer’s recollections of the people and events depicted.

Gottschalk picked up the camera when she was 17, so these images also represent an awakening of her own, as she accepted her identity and became involved with the Gay Liberation Front. It starts with the family. Here is a hauntingly poignant photo of Gottschalk’s 11-year-old sister, Mila, a picture of innocence and peace, asleep in bed in the family’s apartment building.

The blossoming of Mila’s sexuality over the years mirrors Gottschalk’s own. At sixteen years old, Mila appears semi-naked, standing in an apartment, shyly aware of her beauty. A sharp interruption interrupts the images of calm and care: a close-up of their faces in 1979, after intense “gay bashing” with a golf club, their eyelids puffy and purple. The photo – taken at Mila’s request – exudes their shared discontent. Another photo, taken almost 20 years later, shortly after Mila began her transformation, shows her sitting in her mother’s apartment, relaxed and happy. Mila’s story – at least the one the exhibition tells, ends in 2013, with a photo of her, now complete.

In the photographs, there is little separation between the public and the political. One of Gottschalk’s most famous photographs depicts a couple huddled under a rough-looking blanket on one bed, in another collapsed apartment. Above them is a poster from the Revolutionary Women’s Conference: Lesbians, unite! Gottschalk placed the poster there before taking the photo. It’s a simple image that was poignantly extreme, and it feels like an image of happy gay people that she couldn’t get to before.

Gottschalk’s show is synergistically combined with this year’s Deutsche Börse Foundation Photography Prize. In the shortlisted exhibition (featuring only women and non-binary artists for the first time), marginalized bodies are still threatened, but the camera becomes a tool for solidarity, kinship, and activism, a way to protect inner worlds, and a way out of loneliness.

This year’s award moves boldly towards elegant, simple presentation formats, giving images – and viewers – space. This begins with René Matich, who shares the themes and urgency of Gottschalk’s work while documenting their young queer community. The Turner Prize-nominated artist’s room reconstructs the Wheel of Feelings. Matic’s trademark memoirs, smeared, sensual snapshots of friends and family, printed in various sizes, are mounted in glass-panel structures that allow them to overlap, bump, and rub against each other, like sweaty bodies in a smoke-filled club.

The properties of glass—an amorphous solid—provide a metaphor for the experiences of Matic’s subjects, a society shaped by fragility, vulnerability, and fluidity, but also characterized by resilience. Matic, who was born in 1997, is like the Wolfgang Tillmann of his generation, evoking tensions and ideas through the way they create spatial installations, using towers and various structures to guide the viewer. Individually, their images are mostly unexceptional – but when viewed together, bouncing off each other, they are powerful.

In the next room, a series of documentary photographs by Jane Evelyn Atwood transport you into the nightmarish world of women’s prisons in the 1990s. Atwood was among the first female photojournalists to gain access to prison, and she committed to the project for 10 years, traveling to 40 prisons in nine countries and spending at least a week in each prison. Shocked by what she saw – hellish conditions, physical and mental abuse, and inhumane treatment, including women giving birth in handcuffs – Atwood’s project became a clarion cry for change.

Although she takes her pictures carefully, over time, she comes at you with angry speed – shaking you. Most of the incarcerated women she met were mothers separated from their children, incarcerated for nonviolent crimes, or there because of men who abused them. One stark photo depicts an empty death row chapel at the maximum-security Riverbend Institution in Nashville. The church is bare and barren except for the strict lines of the pews and two posters hand-stitched by the prisoners and hung on the walls. In simple and precise writing, they write two words: Helps. free.

Upstairs, Weronika Gęsicka’s encyclopedia doesn’t quite match the blazing energy, but she’s more playful in spreading and twisting knowledge. Gęsicka used stock images and artificial intelligence to create images of hundreds of fake facts – invented entries and false definitions found in encyclopedias, dictionaries and other historical reference publications. With its vivid colors and simulated presentation formats – some works are framed to look like artefacts or wooden boxes of curiosities – Gęsicka draws you deep into the world of untrustworthy images, where truth is divorced from reality. Her work is a dystopian vision of the future, and carries a warning: We need to quickly learn how to decipher truth from sophisticated fakery, before we lose ourselves completely.

The exhibition ends with Amak Mahmoudian, an Iranian artist living in exile in the United Kingdom. Mahmoudian worked with 16 other exiles over several years to create her elegiac, lyrical and multimedia work One Hundred and Twenty Minutes. Mahmoudian recorded each individual’s recurring dreams and created images to represent each individual’s elements. She then blends them together using poetry, film and photography. The results ripple like a wave of dreams along a wall, a journey through the subconscious. There are recurring motifs, charged with symbolism, of windows and mirrors, spectral figures dressed in white, snakes and hands. It gives you the sensation of drifting and floating, five stories above street level, above the level of consciousness.

It is a poignant, sensitive and original approach to social documentary work, representing the key to displacement without highlighting identity or capitalizing on pain. Mahmoudian demonstrates the universal human capacity to dream, hope, and hold on to memories of home even when separated from it. The room and the photos have a melancholic tone, but I find some solace in Mahmoudian’s message that there are things we can keep with us that, without even realizing it, can never be taken away.