Grand prize winners of Leica Oskar Barnack Awards announced
Iranian-born photographer Kiana Hayeri has been named winner of the main category of the 42nd annual Leica Oskar Barnack Award (LOBA). Her submission, Written on the Ice, Left in the Sun, was a firm favourite with the judging panel. Meanwhile, German photographer Valentin Goppel took out top honours in the Newcomer category with his series, Between the Years.
The two winning series and the finalists' photographic projects will be on display at the Ernst Leitz Museum in Leitz-Park Wetzlar, Germany, until January 2023.
The winner of the LOBA receives 40,000 euros and Leica camera equipment valued at 10,000 euros; the winner of the Newcomer Award receives 10,000 euros and a Leica Q2.
The winning entries
Kiana Hayeri: Promises Written on the Ice, Left in the Sun, Leica Oskar Barnack Award winner, 2022
After the withdrawal of Western troops from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, it took only a few days for the Taliban to destroy all the achievements made in the areas of freedom of expression, women’s rights and education, and to instil fear and insecurity in their place. Hayeri has been living in Afghanistan for seven years and her work centres, in particular, around the living situations of women.
“My work focuses on Afghan women; the same women who were put at the centre of war efforts to liberate them, shortly after the Americans invaded Afghanistan,” Hayeri says. “Today, many of these women feel that they have been abandoned and left behind. Afghanistan is a place of extremes, where the best and the worst of humanity live side by side. Fear and courage, despair and hope, life and death coexist.”
Check out her submission at this link.
Valentin Goppel: Between the Years, Leica Oskar Barnack Newcomer Award winner, 2022
Goppel’s seriesexplores the impact of the pandemic on his generation. He, too, experienced the sudden break away from habits, and the feelings of insecurity that seemed to define people’s plans and the future. Corona was like a catalyser for an ongoing sense of disorientation. Photography, however, offered him a tool with which to better understand his thoughts and fears, and enabled him to give the sense of forlornness visual expression.
“The pandemic was an exceptional situation for all of us. We were suddenly fighting against demons, which we had held back by means of familiar distractions,” Goppel says “It is amazing how similar the experiences of these last years were for me and my friends – and yet, we all felt so alone. My state of limbo drags on.”
You can see the entire submission at this link.
About the winners
Kiana Hayeri
Kiana Hayeri was born in 1988, in Tehran, Iran, where she grew up, before emigrating to Toronto, Canada, as a teenager. In 2021, she received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for her series,“Where Prison Is a Kind of Freedom”, documenting the lives of Afghan women in Herat prison. In 2020, she received the Tim Hetherington Visionary Award and became the sixth recipient of the James Foley Award for Conflict Reporting. Hayeri is a Senior TED Fellow and works regularly for The New York Times and National Geographic. She lives in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Valentin Goppel
Valentin Goppel was born in Regensburg, in 2000. He was still a teenager when he began taking photographs. In 2019, he commenced studying Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at college in Hanover. His work has been published in Spiegel and Die Zeit, among others. He is currently working on his first photo book.