Ruff ’s images are based on black-and- white satellite photographs of the surface of Mars taken by the high-resolution camera aboard Nasa’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. These pictures, used by scientists to study the planet’s geology and plot potential landing sites, reveal extreme close-ups of the red planet’s rugged surface, until recently unseen by anyone.
He makes what he calls “visual statements that are at once documentary and fictional” by transforming the originals via chromogenic printing techniques. “Indicative of Nasa’s own efforts to measure topographic highs and lows,” Ruff says, “these works add an aspect of the absurd, in that you can actually recognise deep relief on the surface of another planet with cheap 3D glasses.”
The Jewish-Russian photographer Pavel Wolberg was born in Leningrad and grew up in southern Israel. Now living and working in Tel Aviv, he is ostensibly a documentary photographer but his nominated work, Barricades, is driven by personal exploration of his identity. The series comprises panoramic photographs taken from within Israel and the West Bank and in Ukraine during the recent conflict.
Each of the images focus on barricades, dividing fences, separating walls and improvised borders as “living signifiers” of conflicts and disputes. “This is a photographic journey that focuses on two contemporary conflicts: Israel-Palestine and Russia-Ukraine,” he says.
Both his Russian and Israeli heritage comprise active parts of his identity. “Both places are controlled by a human need to constantly formulate, define and separate spaces for living, of nations or communities,” he says. “Barricades is, therefore, a personal project – a research into landscape imagery and its transformation into an emblematic, disordered space during territorial disputes.”
Finally, Prix Pictet has shortlisted Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi, based in Tokyo, for a somewhat existential project. Her series focuses on a Japanese farming practice called yakihata, in which fields are burned before planting. Yakihata, Kawauchi says, has been practiced for 1300 years and still takes place every year in March. The inspiration came from a dream in which she stood in front of burning fields, prompting her to travel to the southern Japanese town of Aso to take these pictures.
“Standing by myself, solitary in that vast land, the feeling that I was living on this planet called Earth suddenly welled up inside me,” she says. “Since I never paid attention to such thoughts in my everyday life, it was an odd sensation: the awareness that my legs were, at that very moment, being pulled by gravity toward the Earth.”
The work of the finalists goes on show at the V&A on 04 May, when the winner will be announced by Prix Pictet Honorary President Kofi Annan. The exhibition runs until 28 May, before a global tour throughout 2017. prixpictet.com
Show: Prix Pictet 'Space' at the V&A
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