With the exhibition gute aussichten 2020/2021: New German Photography, the House of Photography at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg is presenting the winners of the renowned award for new graduates in photography from 22 January to 1 May 2022. Eight prize winners were selected by a jury for the 17th edition of gute aussichten.
Every edition of gute aussichten is a seismograph whose oscillations reflect the diverse echoes of current social and political as well as aesthetic and media discourses. The selected photographers can be viewed through the lens of Brigitte Kronauer’s novel Das Schöne, Schäbige, Schwankende. In Kronauer’s view, characters portrayed in literature must go through the three stages of development referenced in the title of her novel: the beautiful, the shabby, and the wavering. Applying this to photography, the artists featured in gute aussichten break down their models and subjects into numerous possible realities, all of which reveal the beautiful, the shabby, or the wavering.
Sophie Allerding, who studied at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences and the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, explores the physical connections of myths in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest in her work Leuchtende Augen.
In Ataxia/Ataraxia, Leon Billerbeck, who lives in Leipzig, searches for ways to confront and deal with his father’s neurological illness.
In Wahala, Robin Hinsch, who also studied at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, questions the mechanisms of exploitation and the conditions of the global extraction of fossil fuels. An earlier series by Hinsch was shown at the Deichtorhallen in 2015 as part of the European Photo Exhibition Award.
In her series of photographs Familie Ritchie, the Berlin-based photographer Jana Ritchie focuses on the ambivalence as well as the striving for individuality and independence of individual members of her own family.
In The Evidence of Jahalin, Tina Schmidt and Kerry Steen, who graduated from Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences, document the Jahalin Bedouin in the Palestinian village of Khan al-Ahmar and their expulsion as a result of the Israeli settlement policy in the West Bank.
In his final thesis Blastogenese X at the Braunschweig University of Art, Conrad Veit created a black-and-white film disguised as an animal documentary featuring hybrid lifeforms which deconstructs the boundaries between humans and animals, as well as masculinity and femininity.
