Prize nomination for alumna’s critique of communication

Clare Strand, who graduated from the university in BA Photography in 1995, has been nominated for the Deutsche Bӧrse Photography Foundation Prize 2020, which was founded by The Photographers’ Gallery in 1996.

The award “recognises artists and projects deemed to have made the most significant contribution to photography over the last 12 months”.

The winner of the £30,000 prize will be announced at a special award ceremony held at The Photographers’ Gallery on Thursday 14 May, 2020. An exhibition of the shortlisted projects will be on show at the gallery from 21 February to 7 June 2020.

Also nominated are Mohamed Bourouissa, Anton Kusters and Mark Neville.

Clare’s shortlisted series of work, entitled ‘The Discrete Channel with Noise’, entails painting and projection as well as photography. It was inspired by photographer George H Eckhardt’s ‘Electronic Television’ (1936), which examined the transmission of images via telegraphic communication.

While she was at a residency in Paris, Clare asked her husband back in the UK to choose ten images from her archive of photographs and transmit them to her by telephone.

Her husband communicated a sequence of numbers between 1-10 relating to the tonal code of each photographic element on the grid. When Clare received the message, she painted the code on a hand-drawn, large-scale grid she had created in her studio.

‘The Discrete Channel with Noise’ is described on Clare’s website as: “Set in our time, when the misinterpretation, mismanagement and misrepresentation of information – whether deliberate or accidental – has an ever-increasing and overwhelming effect on our everyday life.

“These failures of communication can lead to minor confusion, fantastic revelation or global outrage, depending when and where they occur.”

Brett Rogers, Director of The Photographers’ Gallery, said Clare’s work “combines conceptual rigour with playfulness in exploring the problematics of transmission and communication”.