The Leica Oskar Barnack Award 2021: Winners
Over one hundred respected photography experts from 43 countries, including curators, gallery managers, art directors, and numerous photographers, have selected the participants for LOBA 2021.
Based upon personal expertise and experience, each member from this team of nominators has choosed up to three photo series. The only requirements for a nomination are that the photographic work be of a documentary or conceptual-artistic nature and that it deals with the relationship between people and their environment. This humanistic constant has defined the LOBA competition, since its inception in 1979. In addition to the candidates for the main award, each nominator may name one additional photographer, under 30 years of age, for the LOBA Newcomer Award.
The winner of the Leica Oskar Barnack Award 2021 is the Venezuelan photographer Ana María Arévalo Gosen. For her series “Días Eternos” she was awarded in the main category in the 41st competition year of LOBA. In addition to the prize money of 40,000 euros, she also receives camera equipment valued at 10,000 euros.
The crisis in Latin American penal systems, and the shocking reality for women inmates, stand at the centre of this emotional series. Thousands of women sit in over-crowded prisons and detention centres. They lack everything: space, hygiene, medical care and, above all, respect and justice. With empathy and visual vehemence, the Venezuelan photographer reports on the situation, in a series that has already received a number of awards.
Ana María Arévalo Gosen lived in Europe for a long time, including in France and Germany. After she returned to her home country of Venezuela, in 2017, a journalist friend told her about the undignified and inhumane living conditions in women’s prisons there. The first visit to a detention centre was a shock for the photographer, and pushed her to begin intensely documenting the untenable situation. “It is a body of work that shows evidence of one of the root causes of the crisis in Venezuela,” she explains. “The criminal justice system does not work equally for everybody. On the contrary, it takes away the rights of the poorest and most vulnerable members of society. Justice is lost in my country.”
The pictures are very evocative: inmates lie on mats in very tight quarters; they barely have air to breathe; and can only make use of very makeshift washing facilities. At the same time, there are motifs full of solidarity and trust, amid the hardly bearable conditions of everyday life. In Venezuela, it is the pre-trial detention centres, in particular, that are largely defined by a lack of any rights. While the law decrees that a judge has 45 days to decide if a woman is to go to prison or can be set free, the state fails in its mission. The women often have to wait for months, sometimes years – eternal days – till a decision is made. The consequences are dramatic: there is not adequate care; and it is even up to the inmates’ relatives to bring them food and water. Violence, randomness and despair define daily life.
It was also not an easy or safe situation for the photographer to be in, either. “As a photojournalist, I try to take as many precautions as possible. There is always someone who knows where I am, and I have a security protocol that I have been fine-tuning, over time. And my intuition is always alert.” Trust is the basis needed to connect with the women. “I think it’s more like the primal feeling that one produces in the other; they can feel that I go with good intentions,” the photographer says, referring to encounters. “I treat them with the respect they deserve. I allow myself to feel vulnerable, honest and empathetic to their stories. I talk to them about my own experience and life. I sing with them… that honesty helps me connect with them, and this connection allows the intimacy that resonates and is felt in the images.”
The Leica Oskar Barnack Award Newcomer 2021 goes to the German photographer Emile Ducke. For his series “Kolyma – Along the Road of Bones” he was honoured in the young talent category of the LOBA. As winner of the Newcomer Award, Emile Ducke receives the prize money of 10,000 euros and a Leica Q2.
The Russian population’s memories of Kolyma are defined by fear. In this very remote region of eastern Siberia, hundreds of thousands of prisoners built a road, laboured in mines, and lost their lives. How does a society deal with its memories of the past? This was the question asked by the photographer Emile Ducke, who travelled along the 2000 km route, discovering traces left in the snow and on the faces of the people.
“It was the Kolyma Tales, by the Russian author Warlam Schalamow, that inspired me to begin this project,” the photographer explains. “He used the book to process his own imprisonment in a forced-labour camp in the Kolyma region. He came to Magadan in 1937, a victim of Stalin’s Great Terror. I couldn’t forget his report on the ‘cold extreme of cruelty’. I wanted to understand how people in the region today deal with memories of the horrors of the Gulag.”
Wearing warm clothes, good gloves, and with sophisticated logistics, he set out in the deepest part of winter, when temperatures drop as far as minus 38 degrees Celsius. A common saying, back at the time, underlined the harshness of the Kolyma region’s climate: “Kolyma, you wonderful planet – twelve months of winter, and the rest is summer.”
Ducke wanted his work to accurately reflect this cold. He was also aiming to document an area that today stands at a crossroad: the last witnesses of an era are passing away; the remains of the camps are disappearing in the snow.
