Entries are now open for the 2019 Leica Oskar Barnack Award (LOBA). The award is divided into two categories – the LOBA for professional photographers and the LOBA Newcomer for prospective professional photographers aged 28 or under.
An international jury will award the Leica Oskar Barnack Award to a professional photographer whose unerring powers of observation capture and express the relationship between man and the environment in the most graphic form in a sequence of 10-12 images.
Entry submissions must be a self-contained series of images in which the photographer perceives and documents the interaction between man and the environment with acute vision and contemporary visual style – creative, groundbreaking and innovative.
The winner of the Leica Oskar Barnack Award will receive a cash prize of 25,000 Euros plus a Leica M camera and a lens worth 10,000 Euros. The winner of the Leica Oskar Barnack Newcomer Award will receive a cash prize of 10,000 Euros and a Leica M camera and lens worth 10,000 Euros. In addition to these two categories, ten finalists will be awarded with a cash prize of 2,500 Euros for their series.
Entering the competition
• Visit leica-oskar-barnack-award.com
• Read 'How to Take Part'
• Check 'Contest Rules and Terms & Conditions' for eligibility
• Entries will be accepted exclusively as online submissions between March 1 and April 1, 2019.
• Only one entry per photographer is accepted.
Follow this link to view past winners and finalists of the Leica Oskar Barnack Awards.
Winner of the 2018 Leica Oskar Barnack Awards
Leica Oskar Barnack 2018 winner Max Pinckers.
Who was Oskar Barnack?
From 1914, Oskar Barnack (1879–1936) used the prototype camera he developed, today known as the Ur-Leica, for photography. He captured various events in entire series of photographs and became one of the earliest photographers to document the relationships between man and the environment. For instance, his photography of the floods in Wetzlar in 1920 is now considered to be the first reportage series shot with a 35mm still film camera.
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