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I’ve often wondered how high finance has ended up so closely involved with the earnestly ethical practice of documentary photography The Swiss asset manager Pictet Group sponsors Photo London fair, JP Morgan sponsors Paris Photo, and the Frankfurt stock exchange sponsors and names the Deustche Börse prize Mathieu Asselin is the only nominee for the latter prize who has incorporated this contradiction into his exhibition, albeit in a small way Placed among his photographs, on the wall at the Photographers’ Gallery in London, is a neatly framed electronic screen, ‘provided free of charge by the official Börse Frankfurt App’, showing in real time the stock price of Monsanto, the corporation which Asselin hopes to bring down   Asselin is part of a wave of documentary artists using film and photography to powerful effect His project, a book entitled Monsanto: A Photographic Investigation (Kettler Verlag, 2017), is a sprawling five year project tracing the long destructive history of the eponymous chemicals manufacturing and agroindustrial company   The 43 year old French-Venezuelan photographer first made his name covering large scale disasters – a destructive tornado in the American Midwest, and the BP Gulf Oil Spill in Florida For these projects Asselin expertly employed a common trope of disaster photography – portraits of victims amongst the wreckage In the case of Monsanto there are plenty of victims, but tracking and photographing the wreckage left by the company is a more complicated task How do you photograph economic structures, unseen illnesses, pollutants with effects that unfold over decades, a relentless public relations machine? In the face of this challenge Asselin evolved his methods The resultant book is halfway between a beautifully designed report and an eclectic scrapbook It tells the history of the company across four linked projects – ‘House of the Future’, ‘Agent Orange’, ‘Monsanto City’ and ‘The Contract’ – using carefully composed photographic landscapes, portraits and still lifes, corporate contracts, collages, adverts, videos (via QR code), maps, tables, letters, doodles, slogans and postcards   As the pages turn, and this material piles up, Monsanto comes across as a kind of sprawling voracious monster, twisting and devouring the