Introduction | Shortlist | Judging Panel | Critics | Discussion Forums | Questions & Answers

Teach Yourself Turner Prize Criticism

Photography | Plagiarism | Rubbish

Remember the controversies of Turner Prizes past? Here's our quick reminder of what the papers said:

		No Hirst, no Emin, but still the Turner Prize has a shock in store: the winner is a photographer
		The Independent

The first stills photographer to win the Turner Prize was German-born Wolfgang Tillmans, two years ago. Tillmans' work brought up two favourites of Turner Prize criticism:
'Is it art?' and 'Is is obscene?'.

The Independent began its coverage by declaiming

Photography is art. That ... is official after the decision ... to award a photographer the Turner Prize for the first time

though it undercut this by repeating one collector's verdict that

newspaper photographers take much more moving photographs

Other critics sought to further the controversy by reporting that Tillmans had first achieved fame as a fashion photographer working for style magazines, wryly noting that the prize was presented by fashion designer Paul Smith. One revealed that Tillmans had 'confessed' that his initial impetus came from photocopiers and that his first purchase with the prize money would be a colour photocopier.

True to form, The Telegraph preferred to deal with the obscenity issue, backing up its assertion that Tillmans'

claim to be an artist is challenged by some critics

by revealing that he had a

special line in taking pornographic homosexual pictures

and that, of the work shown at the Turner Prize exhibition,

only one, a photograph of a man with his jeans unzipped, gives a clue to some of his other work. WH Smith … once banned a magazine with a spread of homo-erotic images taken by Tillmans. He has also photographed a naked man with chained nipples masturbating and a former male lover urinating on a chair

Meanwhile, in The Observer, Matthew Collings wrote scathingly

I have no idea why Tillmans is supposed to be an artist. If he wins, the message will be that the Tate … wants to get down and boogie in an embarrassing way with the youthful airheads who read The Face.

The Independent went further, describing Tillmans' photos as

Studiedly casual glimpses of a studiedly casual lifestyle, a tedious hymn of self-regarding boho authenticity

The Guardian, however, reported the Jury's claim that Tillmans' work

engaged with contemporary culture while challenging conventional aesthetics

and claimed that Tillmans had

smashed the boundary between commercial photography and art

although it gave the last word to the Stuckists, the group which regularly pickets the Turner Prize awards ceremony

'Art is art and photography is photography' snarled co-founder Charles Thompson, a painter

Photography re-emerged as an issue last year, when the exhibition included photos by Richard Billingham. The Metro challenged its readers to pick the work of the Turner Prize shortlisted artist from photos entered in the National Schools Photography competition to prove that

Winning the Turner Prize is just child's play

and couldn't resist pointing out to any readers who struggled to identify Billingham's work that he was in line for a £20,000 prize, while the winner of the schools competition would get a computer. The Times contented itself with repeating the opinion of one critic of Billingham's work that

If these giant, apparently artless snap-shots were not blown up and displayed on a gallery wall, you might easily assume that they were the aides-memoires of a peculiarly harassed social worker.