Earlier this year, Leica launched the Leica Women Foto Project, a contest dedicated to the expansion of diversity and inclusion in photography. And now, the winners have been announced, chosen from over 600 submissions across the United States.
Photographers Debi Cornwall, Yana Paskova and Eva Woolridge were selected as the winners of Leica’s first contest of this type. Five influential women in the photography, art and entertainment industries formed the judging panel, and they were:
- Karin Kaufmann, Art Director & Chief Representative, Leica Galleries International
- Maggie Steber, VII Agency photographer and Guggenheim fellow
- Elizabeth Avedon, photography book and exhibition designer, independent curator and writer
- Laura Roumanos, executive producer and co-founder, United Photo Industries
- Deborah Willis, university professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and author of Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery
Debi Cornwall was chosen for her series Necessary Fictions, which explores the staging and performance of American power in immersive, realistic military wargames. In this project, Cornwall photographs the mysterious country of “Atropia.”
“Though fictional, Atropia actually exists: mock Afghan and Iraqi villages have been constructed on military bases across the United States to host immersive, realistic military training exercises for troops preparing to deploy. On ten such sites around the country, Cornwall documents these mock villages, battle scenarios, and “cultural role-players,” with the goal of examining how fictions are deployed and embraced, and to invite critical inquiry among military and civilian viewers alike about a society in which war has become the rule rather than the exception.”
Yana Paskova was awarded for her series Where Women Rule. This Bulgaria-born, Chicago-bred, Brooklyn-based photojournalist and writer uses her experience as a political asylum immigrant to find a way to bridge humans’ understanding of each other. She describes the project as “a visual and sociological look at what happens when cultural norms of gender are amended or removed — via the all-female societies across the world, where women gather for shelter or in matriarchy — leaving us with new notions of femininity and masculinity, human bonds, family, and the fluid boundaries of identity.”
Eva Woolridge brought her personal experiences to life in her awarded project The Size of a Grapefruit. The series is an artistic interpretation of her medically traumatic experiences following her diagnosis of a dermoid cyst – the size of a grapefruit – and consequential removal of her right ovary, which she believes could have been saved had medical professionals taken swifter action following their early conversations.
The aim of the contest is to help women create personal projects that will tell stories through the female viewpoint. Therefore, each of the awarded photographers will receive $10,000 prize and a Leica Q2 to pursue a personal project. It needs to be relevant to today’s social and political climate, as expressed through the female perspective, and all three winners have the projects they will work on over the upcoming year.
The Leica Q2 cameras each winner will receive will initially be provided as one-year loans to kickstart a legacy program helping to foster community among recipients. At the end of the term, the cameras will be passed on to the next three winners of the 2020 award. A replacement Leica camera will be offered to the initial set of recipients to continue documenting their journey and their stories.
All three women will showcase photos from their projects in a joint exhibition at Leica Gallery Boston. The exhibition will be live from 5 March 2020 through 26 April 2020 where visitors can view the journey of their personal projects. To learn more about the Leica Women Foto Project Award and the 2019 recipients, visit the contest’s website.
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