The 2017 Finalists

Introducing the ten finalists 2017 with exclusive reports and interviews.

Patrick Willocq

Patrick Willocq

The ‘You cannot pick a stone with one finger’ series by French photographer Patrick Willocq was produced with the Dagomba, an ethnic group in the north of Ghana. Working in close collaboration with the people, he created six decorative sets that reflect the past, present and future of the Dagomba.

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Emilien Urbano

Emilien Urbano

Since the summer of 2014, the French photographer Emilien Urbano has been working on his long-term project ‘War of a Forgotten Nation’, documenting various Kurdish militias in their struggle for autonomy as well as against Islamic State. Kurdish fighters were just involved in freeing the Iraqi city of Mosul from the clutches of IS.

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Vera Torok

Vera Torok

The pictures in this series were taken in London, Hong Kong and Tokyo with a Leica M6. However, there is nothing specifically recognisable about each city; rather the photographer has found a universal imagery to capture the complexity of everyday life in an urban setting. By using double exposures, she presents a surprising new approach to street photography.

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Viktoria Sorochinski

Viktoria Sorochinski

Viktoria Sorochinski has been exploring the countryside surrounding the Ukrainian capital of Kiev for over ten years, for her ‘Lands of No-Return’ long-term project.

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Ekaterina Sevrouk

Ekaterina Sevrouk

Ekaterina Sevrouk draws on German Romanticism for the landscape images that make up her ‘Fremd bin ich eingezogen’ (As a stranger I arrived) series. While composed of mountains, lakes and wooded areas that are reminiscent of their romantic inspiration, they differ in a decisive factor: all the protagonists in the scenes are young, African men.

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Dominic Nahr

Dominic Nahr

On March 11, 2011, the worst earthquake in Japan’s history took place off the country’s eastern coast. The resulting tsunami cost the lives of around 20,000 people, destroyed thousands of houses and impacted the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant with full force – a worse-case scenario, where the area surrounding the homes of countless people was declared an exclusion zone. Dominic Nahr has visited the area ten times since then, to work on his long-term project, ‘Nothing to see here’.

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Gideon Mendel

Gideon Mendel

The water took everything but their lives: for his long-term project, “Drowning World”, Gideon Mendel photographed victims of flooding all around the planet.

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Aleksey Kondratyev

Aleksey Kondratyev

In Astana, northern Kazakhstan, modernism romps around in gaudy colours. Irrespective, ice fishermen sit on the frozen river Ishim, hoping to make a good catch. The tents they use to protect themselves from the icy cold have been patched together with the leftovers of consumerism and capitalism.

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Yoann Cimier

Yoann Cimier

The French photographer explains how his ‘Nomad’s Land’ series came about. There are times when one simply stumbles across photographic themes on the street or, better still, on the beach.

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Clara Chichin

Clara Chichin

Clara Chichin’s “Under the eyes that few minutes exhaust” series is characterised by enchantingly beautiful, mysterious images taken in high-contrast black and white.The pictures have more in common, however: they are imprints of that which remains after something is lost.

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