The artists nominated by
Johanna-Maria Fritz is an Inge Morath award-winning photographer, currently based in Berlin. She is a graduate of the German Ostkreuzschule for photography and is a member of the Ost- kreuz Agency since the beginning of 2019.
Her photography has appeared in National Geographic, der Spiegel, Newsweek China, Die Zeit, and many others. For her photography she was awarded with the Inge Morath award, received the VG-Bild award and won the Lotto Brandenburg Prize and many more. She has exhibited worldwide in countries like Australia, France, Germany, Switzerland - as well as China, Iceland, Ukraine and the US.
"My photographic work is always documentary in nature. I find it appealing to explore the limits of documentary photography and to anticipate the viewer’s experience while taking pictures.”
Lia Darjes was born in Berlin in 1984 and grew up in Hamburg. She studied with Ute Mahler at HAW in Hamburg and then as a master class student with Ute Mahler and Ingo Taubhorn at Ostkreuzschule in Berlin, where she started teaching in 2018. Her work has been exhibited in Germany, France, Canada, Russia and Switzerland and published in national and international media such as M, le Monde, and CNN. She has received various scholarships and awards, including the young talent award of the Art Prize of the Lotto Foundation Brandenburg.
Her work 'Tempora Morte' is an authentic documentary still-life study from the unofficial roadside-market of Russia's little exclave Kaliningrad.
Lukas Heibges (b. 1985) studied in Holland and Berlin and is currently doing a degree in photography and media in Bielefeld. He lives and works as an artist, shuttling between Berlin and Amsterdam. As a co-founder of a photography and a film collective he understands both photography and film as central tools to visualize social topics from an artistic point of view. He considers these media as the starting point of a wider expression, which combines theoretical considerations with societal debates. The result is a transfer of his artistic expression back to the intersection of theory and practice to question not only the subjects he is working on, but also the medium itself.
Nina Hansch is a photographer who works in classical photojournalism. Her documentary works are characterized by their nuances and a cinematic quality in her visual language. At the same time, she succeeds in emphasizing the socio-political relevance of her stories and in exploring their visual complexity.
"I am always curious about the facets and details of life and humanity. And often ask myself questions like: What are the decisions and circumstances that consequently made us who we are today?", explains the artist.
Alexander Kadow lives and works in Hamburg, Germany, where he was born in 1985. The examination of the possibilities and limits of photography plays a decisive role in his work.
A combination of experimental analogue and digital photography, research-based, documentary elements and scientific imagery searches for the supposed truth content of photography and deals with the ecological effects of human action. Photography is used as an aesthetic object, medium and object of investigation.
After his apprenticeship at the Lette Verein Berlin until 2010 he studied from 2015 at Hochschule für bildende Künste (University of Fine Arts) in Hamburg in the class of Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin and from 2017 in the master class of Ute Mahler and Ingo Taubhorn at Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie. He received the Bachelor of Fine Arts in July 2017 and continues with the MFA at HfbK.
The newest work 'blast from the past' clashes two time scales: Amber is being examined as a time capsule and its possibilities to function as a photographic negative which shows snapshots of insects, frozen in its movement 20 million years ago. But the seabed of the Baltic Sea also keeps bombs and ammunition which were dumped after WWII in order to get rid of it, irrespective of the ecological disaster.
