Full press release:
December 2009 — Leica Camera AG, Solms, extends their invitation to submit entries to their international photography competition for professional photographers, the ‘Leica Oskar Barnack Award’. Applications from interested photographers will be accepted exclusively online at www.leicaoskar-barnack-award.com between 15 January and 15 March 2010. The competition also includes the awarding of a ‘Newcomer Award’ that addresses all (prospective) professional photographers aged 25 and under.
An international jury awards the ‘Leica Oskar Barnack Award’ / ‘Leica Oskar Barnack
Newcomer Award’ to photographers whose unerring powers of observation capture and
express the relationship between man and the environment in the most graphic form in a
sequence of between ten and twelve 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 unintrusive. All photo series submitted will be displayed in a specially
dedicated online gallery on the Leica website.
The ‘Leica Oskar Barnack Award’ is a prize of 5,000 euros or, alternatively, Leica camera
equipment to the same value. The winner of the Newcomer Award receives 2,500 euros. The
prizes will be presented in the course of the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie
photographic festival held in Arles, France.
Further information, the terms and conditions for entering and specific requirements for
submissions will be available on the Leica website from 15 January 2010 and at www.leicaoskar-barnack-award.com.
The competition history:
From 1914 on, Oskar Barnack (1879–1936), the inventor of the Leica, increasingly 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 ever shot with a 35-mm still-film camera.
The competition named after this photographic pioneer was first awarded in 1979, on the
occasion of the 100th anniversary of Oskar Barnack’s birth.