Leica Oskar Barnack Award 2021 winners announced

The winners of the 41^st annual Leica Oskar Barnack Award were recently named at an award ceremony with Venezuelan photographer Ana María Arévalo Gosen named overall winner for her series, Días Eternos.

German photographer Emile Ducke took out the Leica Oskar Barnack Award Newcomer category (for up-and-coming photographers up to 30 years of age) with his series, Kolyma – Along the Road of Bones.

In addition to 40,000 euros, Ana María Arévalo Gosen also receives Leica camera equipment valued at 10,000 euros. Winner of the Newcomer Award, Emile Ducke receives 10,000 euros in prize money, as well as a Leica Q2.

Leica Oskar Barnack Award Winner 2021

Born in 1988, Ana María Arévalo Gosen’s series, Días Eternos, focuses on the harrowing living conditions of women in jail. The images were captured in prisons in Venezuela and El Salvador.

As Arévalo Gosen explains: “In the portraits of the women in jail, I'm concerned about the conditions of their imprisonment, where human rights seem to be ignored. I don’t think I can change these women’s lives, but at least through my work I can show that they exist.”

About the winner

Ana María Arévalo Gosen was born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1988. She studied photography at the École supérieure de Photographie in Toulouse and at the EFTI (Centro Internacional de Fotografia y Cine) in Madrid. She uses photography as a means to tell visual stories with a high documentary value. The focus of her work is on projects related to women’s rights and environmental issues. She received a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting to complete her Días Eternos project. The series has already earned her the LUMIX Award and the Lucas Dolega Award. She is a member of Ayün Fotógrafas, a collective of Latin American women photographers. She moves between Bilbao and Latin America.

Leica Oskar Barnack Award Newcomer 2021

Thousands of Stalin-era gulag inmates died during the construction of a highway through the remote and icy Siberian region of Kolyma. When travelling along the so-called Road of Bones, the German documentary photographer Emile Ducke (born in 1994) looked not only for remnants of the former forced-labour camps, but also questioned how they are remembered today.

“What moved me most, during my journey along the Kolyma Highway, built by prisoners from the gulags of Russia’sFar East, were the meetings with contemporary witnesses to and survivors of that tragic past,” Emile Ducke stated.

About the winner

Emile Ducke was born in 1994. In 2017, he decided to put off finishing his college degree in Photojournalism and moved to Moscow, where he has been ever since. He works on personal projects, as well as assignments for various international publications. As a regular contributor to The New York Times, he has documented the consequences of the melting permafrost above the Arctic Circle, investigated the legacy of Stalin's forced-labour camps in the Far East of Russia, and captured scenes of traditional life in Chechnya. His photo essays have been published in the Washington Post, National Geographic and Spiegel, among others. He was elected as a World Press Photo 6x6 Visual Storyteller, named one of the Photo District News’s 30 emerging photographers, and awarded the n-ost Reportage Prize for his coverage of Eastern Europe.

2021 jury members

• Sandra M. Stevenson, Assistant Editor, Photography, The New York Times, USA
• Ralph Gibson, Photographer, USA
• Santiago Lyon, Photographer and Head of Advocacy and Education, Adobe, Spain
• Dr. Michael Pritchard, Director Education and Public Affairs, Royal Photographic Society, Great Britain

Head to the awards website to learn more about the compeition and check out all the finalists for 2021.

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