Donna Gottschalk and Hélène Giannecchini / Deutsche Börse prize review – images to enrage, bamboozle and deeply move you

. UK edition

A black-and-white photograph of Donna Gottschalk, wearing a check shirt over a T-shirt. She is standing beside a couple and there is a Gay Liberation Front poster on the wall behind her
Donna Gottschalk, A Self-portrait during a Gay Liberation Front meeting, East 9th Street, New York, 1970. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and Marcelle Alix, Paris/© Donna Gottschalk

Gottschalk documents lesbian life in the 60s and 70s, while this year’s Deutsche Börse prize ranges from appalling scenes from women’s prisons to an exploration of invented facts

When Donna Gottschalk came out as gay to her mother, she replied: “You’ve chosen a rough path.” It was New York in the 1960s, homosexuality was illegal and, as the photographer reflects in a video piece included in her new exhibition We Others: “There were no happy gay people.” A photograph of Gottschalk’s mother in the beauty salon she ran in the notoriously crime-ridden Alphabet City appears at the start of the show, in which the images are accompanied by texts by the French writer Hélène Giannecchini, recording the photographer’s memories of the people and events depicted.

Gottschalk picked up a camera at 17, so these pictures also constitute her own awakening, as she accepted her identity and became involved with the Gay Liberation Front. It starts with family. Here is a painfully poignant image of Gottschalk’s sister, Myla, aged 11, the picture of innocence and peace, asleep in bed in the family’s apartment in a tenement building.

The blossoming of Myla’s sexuality over the years reflects Gottschalk’s own. At 16, Myla appears semi-nude, posing in an apartment, shyly aware of their beauty. A sharp interruption cuts through the images of quiet and care: a 1979 image of their face, close up, after a severe “gay bashing” with a golf club, their eyelids swollen and purple. The image – taken at Myla’s request – pulses with their shared indignation. Another picture, taken almost 20 years later, soon after Myla began to transition shows her sitting in their mother’s apartment, relaxed and happy. Myla’s story – at least the one the exhibition tells, ends in 2013, with a picture of her, now fully herself.

In the pictures, there is little separation between the public and political. One of Gottschalk’s best-known images depicts a couple huddled under a rough-looking blanket on a single bed, in another collapsing apartment. Above them is a poster from the Revolutionary Women’s Conference: Lesbians Unite! Gottschalk put the poster there before taking the picture. It’s a simple image that was scorchingly radical, and feels like the kind of image of happy gay people she had never had access to.

Gottschalk’s show blurs synergetically into this year’s Deutsche Börse photography foundation prize. In the shortlist exhibition (which, for the first time, features only women and non-binary artists), marginalised bodies are still under threat, but the camera becomes a tool for solidarity, kinship and activism, a way to protect inner worlds, a way out of loneliness.

This year’s prize moves boldly towards elegant and stripped-down forms of display, giving images – and viewers – space. This starts with Rene Matić, who shares the themes and urgency of Gottschalk’s work as they document their own young, queer community. The Turner prize-nominated artist’s room restages their installation Feelings Wheel. Matić’s trademark diaristic, smudgy, sensual snapshots of friends and family, printed at various sizes, are mounted in glass-panel structures that allow them to overlap, collide and rub up against one another, like sweaty bodies at a smoky club.

The qualities of glass – a material that is an amorphous solid – provides a metaphor for the experiences of Matić’s subjects, a community shaped by precarity, vulnerability and fluidity, but which is also resilient. Matić, who was born in 1997, is the Wolfgang Tillmans of their generation, teasing out tensions and ideas by the way they create spatial installations, using varied constellations and structures to direct the viewer. Individually, their images are mostly unexceptional – but seen together, bouncing off one another, they have power.

In the next room, a series of documentary photographs by Jane Evelyn Atwood plunge you into the nightmarish world of women’s prisons in the 1990s. Atwood was among the first female photojournalists to gain access to a jail, and she committed 10 years to the project, travelling to 40 prisons in nine countries and spending at least a week in each prison. Shocked by what she saw – hellish conditions, physical and mental abuse, dehumanising treatment, including women giving birth while handcuffed – Atwood’s project became a clarion cry for change.

Though she took her photographs carefully, over time, they come at you at an enraged velocity – they shake you. Most of the incarcerated women she met were mothers separated from their children, imprisoned for non-violent crimes, or there because of the men who abused them. One of the starkest images depicts the empty death row chapel at Riverbend maximum security institution in Nashville. The chapel is bare and barren except for the severe lines of pews, and two posters, hand-stitched by prisoners, which hang on the walls. In simple, delicate lettering, they spell out two words: HELP. FREE.

Upstairs, Weronika Gęsicka’s Encyclopaedia doesn’t quite match the blazing energy, but is a more playful take on the dissemination of knowledge and its misrepresentation. Gęsicka used stock and AI imagery to generate images for hundreds of fake facts – invented entries and faux definitions found in encyclopedias, dictionaries and other historical reference publications. With their lucid colours and simulated forms of display – some works framed to look like artefacts or wooden curiosity cases – Gęsicka draws you deeper into the swirling, sticky realm of untrustworthy imagery, where truth is unstuck from reality. Her work is a dystopian view of the future, and carries a warning: we need to learn fast how to decipher fact from sophisticated fake, before we lose ourselves entirely.

The exhibition ends with Amak Mahmoodian, an Iranian artist living in exile in the UK. Mahmoodian worked with 16 other exiles over several years to create her elegiac, lyrical, multimedia work One Hundred and Twenty Minutes. Mahmoodian recorded the recurring dreams of each individual and created images to represent elements of each. She then mixed them together, using poetry, film and photography. The results undulate like the wave of dreams along the wall, a journey through the unconscious. There are recurring motifs, charged with symbolism, of windows and mirrors, spectral figures wearing white, snakes and hands. They give you the sensation of drifting and floating, five storeys above street level, above consciousness.

It is a touching, sensitive and original approach to social documentary work, representing the wrench of displacement without foregrounding identity or profiting from pain. Mahmoodian shows the universally human capacity to dream, to hope, to hold on to a memories of homeland even when you are torn from it. The room and the images have a melancholic tenor, but I find some solace in Mahmoodian’s message that there are things we can keep with us, even without realising, that can never be taken away.