Leica Women Foto Project announces its powerful 2022 winners

In honor of Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day, Leica announced the three winners of the annual Leica Women Foto Project Award. Like every year, this contest is a part of Leica’s initiative to expand diverse representation in the photography industry, to include all perspectives, and to empower women. And just like in previous contests, the winning images are thought-provoking and powerful in 2022, too.

This year’s winners are Rania Matar, Rosem Morton, and September Bottoms from the US with their photo essays on different topics.

Rania Matar is an acclaimed Lebanese photographer and 2018 Guggenheim Fellow. For the photo series that brought her the Leica Women Photo Project award, she traveled to her home country to produce her stunning project Where Do I Go?. It was inspired by the young generation of Lebanese women whose resilience and hope shine through the complexities of living in a country ill-prepared for COVID-19 and ravaged by corruption and an ongoing financial crisis.

As part of her larger initiative and best-selling photography book, SHE, Rania’s winning project explores issues of personal and collective identity through female adolescence and womanhood. A gripping and beautifully-shot examination of subjectivity and the female gaze, the photographer portrays the raw beauty of her subjects: their age, individuality, physicality, and mystery, photographing them the way she, a woman and a mother, sees them, beautiful and alive.

© Rania Matar/Leica Women Foto project 2022: Lea, La Maison Rose, Beirut, Lebanon, 2019 — I photographed Lea at La Maison Rose, an old abandoned home overlooking the Mediterranean, a staple of the old remaining Lebanese architecture. Many old homes damaged during the Lebanese Civil War are still standing – a painful reminder of a past that looms heavy over the collective memory of the young generation who is growing up in its shadow. Here, Lea is looking at us but her body is turning the other way, toward the Mediterranean Sea, as if symbolically torn in 2 directions.

© Rania Matar/Leica Women Foto project 2022: Farah, Aabey, Lebanon, 2020 — Farah was part of the young generation who been protesting in Lebanon, during the popular uprising that had started in October of 2019, demanding to get rid of the corrupt government. There were factions trying to undermine the protests and they burned Farah’s car. We collaborated to portray the moment, immortalizing the car before it went to the dump. It was an act of resistance.

© Rania Matar/Leica Women Foto project 2022: Mariam, Ramlet Al-Bayda, Beirut, Lebanon, 2021 — The image is almost like a metaphor for Lebanon right now: the beautiful Mediterranean, the strong woman standing proudly, and the decaying swing-set.

© Rania Matar/Leica Women Foto project 2022: Lara, Koura, Lebanon, 2021 — Lara grew up in the beautiful region of Koura in northern Lebanon. We met close to the place she grew up and we found the tree that she used to climb as a kid and made pictures there. This is her safe place where she can disconnect from reality when she needs it.

© Rania Matar/Leica Women Foto project 2022: Demi, Brummana, Lebanon, 2021 — Demi was injured in the August 4, 2020 explosions. I photographed her on the eve of the anniversary. She chose this location with all the broken glass and wrote the following: “We were mesmerized by the fragmented building, each broken piece told a familiar story a mountain away from Beirut. The simulated space induced catharsis one year after in the environment I now feel safest in, grateful to have an alternate set of photographs to commemorate August 4 2020. All is blue for a time glass shelters, reflections of pink sweeping skies – somewhere to float somewhere to flower and somewhere to die, I am still belonging”

© Rania Matar/Leica Women Foto project 2022: Lara B, Corniche, Beirut, Lebanon, 2021 — Lara moved from Paris where she was living to volunteer in Lebanon after the August 4 explosions. She wrote a poem in French about Ophelia as a metaphor for Beirut. Here is passage from her poem: “This water is indeed our tears, it is where you are drowning…. You are all those women who don’t fight”. In addition she is swimming in between all the water bottles that people shamelessly toss in the sea.

© Rania Matar/Leica Women Foto project 2022: Samira, Beirut, Lebanon, 2021 — Samira is a third generation Palestinian refugee living in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Beirut. I have known her and her family since Samira was 5. She is now 21. I had been photographing her in the refugee camp for years but in the past 2 years we started leaving the camp and making pictures by the Mediterranean Sea. On our way back we saw the barbed wire and the flowers with the sea behind and we stopped. She said “I am outside but I am still trapped.”

© Rania Matar/Leica Women Foto project 2022: Rhea S, Piccadilly Abandoned Theater, Beirut, Lebanon, 2021 — The Piccadilly Theater was the place on which the edifice of art and performance were built in the 60s. It later caught fire and burnt down and is now abandoned. In Rhea’s words: “For me the theater embodied a time were the possibility of dreaming and projecting fantasies of oneself was still possible. Shooting there was a challenge, I felt all of a sudden the frustration or the incapability to dream or to project myself as a free respected being. I think Rania felt my frustration and we were both searching for a little light. I ended up being covered in dirt, all over my white dress, which in a way was perfectly aligned to what I was feeling, like a ghost. Living in Lebanon today feels as if you are being sucked every inch of life out of you and left rotting to die.”

Rosem Morton, following a decade-long career as a nurse, became inspired by the intimacy of everyday life amidst gender, health, and racial adversity, so she picked up a camera. Now, she is a documentary photographer, multiple-time National Geographic Photo Grantee, and now, a Leica Women Foto Project Award winner. Her winning project, Wildflower, is shatteringly intimate and urgently important: it’s an interrogation of the effects of rape and the devastating aftermath it has on victims.

What’s more, Rosem’s photos document her own experience with victim shaming and blame a month after her own sexual assault. Exploring life after trauma through paired images and journal entries, the resulting project bears witness to the crippling effects of rape and cycles of violence against women, as well as the photographer’s own story of hope and endurance.

© Rosem Morton/Leica Women Foto Project 2022: When I told my partner I was assaulted, I said, “I will go to therapy for a couple of months and put all of this behind me.” Since then, I have been seeing my therapist every week for months. At the end of this session, I broke down in my car and realized the work has only just begun. (September 11, 2018, Baltimore, MD, USA)

© Rosem Morton/Leica Women Foto Project 2022: I received a phone call from my assaulter. It was not an admission of fault or an apology. It was a phone call to tell me how he felt his actions were justified. The phone call was so devastating that I crashed my car into the garage and broke my side mirror. I looked at myself in broken pieces. (October 9, 2018, Baltimore, MD, USA)

© Rosem Morton/Leica Women Foto Project 2022: I am anxious and wary. This is the first time since the assault that I travelled alone to a place where I knew no one. (February 22, 2019, Columbia, MO, USA)

© Rosem Morton/Leica Women Foto Project 2022: I saw these wildflowers blooming and thriving, something at that time I could not imagine for myself. Since then, I started calling this project, Wildflower, because I too wanted to endure.(November 11, 2018, Baltimore, MD, USA)

September Bottoms was born and raised in Oklahoma. She is a self-taught photographer and New York Times Photography Fellow who focuses her work on women’s issues, family, and poverty as well as the intersection of the three. Her winning project, Remember September, is an amalgamation of these themes; a visual memoir of the artist’s own family, shot through the lens of sexual trauma and poverty.

Occupying a unique space between aesthetic beauty and grotesque subjectivity, Bottoms’ work explores the effects of intergenerational trauma through femininity. Daring to trace these emotional and physical wounds to their original sources while interrogating her own identity as a member of a family plagued by abuse and mental illness, Bottoms seeks to break cycles of violence against women through her own story of resilience and hope.

“The third annual Leica Women Foto Project Award underscores our ongoing commitment to diversity in visual storytelling,” says Kiran Karnani, VP of Marketing for Leica Camera North America.

“Our winners this year demonstrated extraordinary skill, grace, and bravery, creating works that are as daring as they are vital. With this year’s Award and the overarching initiative, we aim to illuminate visual storytellers through programs and resources that foster the development and amplification of the female perspective.”

Each winner will be awarded $10,000, a Leica SL2-S camera with Leica Vario-Elmarit 24-70 ASPH lens, and a 4-week photography exhibition at Fotografiska New York. From 8, the exhibition also features the work of this year’s Leica Oskar Barnack Award winner, Ana María Arévalo.

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