Alfredo Jaar, Winner Of The Hash Prize, "We Create New Realities For The Real World"

In March 9, 2020, the hash foundation officially announced that the 64 year old Chilean photographer Alfredo Jaar was awarded the 2020 hash Foundation International Photography Award ("hash awards"). The jury considered that Alfredo explored complex social and political issues, highlighting the reappearance of moral norms. "Through his silent and thoughtful works, he explores the great problems faced by mankind as a witness to humanitarian disasters, military conflicts, political corruption and the disparity between the rich and the poor."

Alfredo was born in Santiago, Chile in 1956, and moved to Martinique island with his family. In 1972, he returned to Chile with his family. Until the 1982 when he moved to New York, he had been in a changeable and tense political and social atmosphere, and this experience was also an important reason for his becoming an artist. Although he has never systematically studied art or photography, Alfredo combines his expertise and enthusiasm in architecture with other forms of art. As an architect, he accidentally contacts photography in his work. He finds that photography can provide the building with the preservation and proof of time and space scenes. Since then, photography has been used as a tool to understand the world, and has sprouted enthusiasm and interest in photography.

Over the years, Alfredo Jaar has been focusing on topics such as Rwanda genocide, gold mining in Brazil, environmental pollution in Nigeria and immigration between the United States and Mexico. One of his most famous works is the big electronic billboard "A Logo for America" (the US logo) first appeared in Times Square in New York in 1987. There is a blank map of the United States on the billboard. There are only a few characters in the middle of the map, "this is not the United States".

Since its establishment in Sweden in 1980, the hash awards have gone through 40 years, and it is also known as the internationally recognized most prestigious Photography Award. The winners of the hash awards are pioneers in the long term deep ploughing industry. They have Rineke Dijkstra, which is known for their keen attitude towards media and subject matter, a bold trial of static and dynamic portrait photography, and Graciela Iturbide, which extends the concept of documentary photography. These former winners of the hash awards have tried to open up the existing situation and add more interesting possibilities to the field of photography.

Like other predecessors, Alfredo has broken people's accustomed cognition of reality. He questioned the way people used and understood images and pointed out the limitations of photographs and other media in reproducing important events, which he called "the politics of images". In an interview with the foundation, Alfredo said that photography is a question that he has explored all his career. He said: "photography is a fruitless endeavor, a repetition of failures in reality. Because reality can not be reproduced, we can only create a new reality. This is the meaning of photography and the reason why photography is important: we create new realities for the real world.

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