Oskar Barnack (18791936) was of course the inventor of the Leica, a photographer who wanted to make use of 35mm movie film for taking still images, and his pictures of the 1920 floods in Wetzlar qualify as the first reportage series taken with a still camera on 35mm.
Leica started an annual photographic award named after him to make the 100th anniversary of his birth in 1979, and this year, the 30th award was supplemented with a Newcomer Award for photographers under 25. Both are for “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 up to 12 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.” In other words very much the mode of photography that the Leica made possible. The prizes aren’t huge – 5000 and 25000 euros respectively – but the prestige is, with the prizes being presented as a part of the Arles Rencontres.
This year’s winner is South African Mikhael Subotzky (b1981) who became a Magnum Nominee in 2007 and he has more work on his own site, all of it worth a look. He was one of my ‘Top 5′ from PDN’s 30 to watch in 2008 – and again got a mention here when he won the Infinity Young Photographer award the same year.
The Newcomer award went to Swiss-born photographer http://dominicnahr.com/main/ Dominic Nahr for his photographic essay from the Congo, titled The Road to Nowhere. He was one of PDN’s ’30’ to watch this year.
These awards are easy to enter on-line and attract very many entrants from around the world, including some of the best known photojournalists. All of the entries get displayed on the site, and you can look through them in various ways. By default the page that opens in my browser includes James Nachtwey, Bruno Stevens and others whose names I recognise. You can also look at the entries sorted by name – although entrants can choose to use a nickname – a letter of the alphabet at a time, or by country.
Although British entrants are labelled ‘Great Britain’ you will find them under U, though be warned, navigating the sideways scrolling site is somewhat like riding a bucking bronco (perhaps it worked better on the designers own system, but a simpler approach would have been preferable.) Eventually I did manage to find about 30 UK entrants for the main award, covering an extremely wide range of work, with a few of the best photographers around, down to work that could have come from almost any class of students and just one or two that seemed typically Flickr. There were fewer UK entries for the Newcomer Award, but some interesting work among them.
I couldn’t see anywhere the total number of entrants, but it must be pretty huge, and it takes a while for the “Show all” file to download (certainly longer than it took me to type this paragraph.) Fortunately you can start looking through the images before it finishes, but it isn’t easy to handle. There is so much on-line here that I find it difficult to cope, and it isn’t clear how long it will remain on line. Perhaps the best way to view it is the alphabetical listing and I mean to look through perhaps a letter a day, picking a few that interest me to click on to see the whole series.