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Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2024
If you were walking around Vienna in 1968, you might have run into a young woman wearing a Styrofoam box strapped to her chest. The box was fitted with curtains. She would have invited you to part them, and reach inside – to find yourself fondling her breasts.
Born Waltraud Lehner, this former convent girl had reinvented herself as an outrageous performance artist (styling herself Valie Export, after a brand of cigarettes). Visitors to the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, at London’s Photographers’ Gallery, can’t escape Export’s peek-a-boo antics – further proof for those who like to pillory the award for its cerebral nominees, that the prize has dug its own grave. (In what sense is Export a photographer anyway, if she’s not even the one picking up the camera?)