Leica Camera USA has proudly announced the three outstanding photographers who will receive the inaugural Leica Women Foto Project Award.
Earlier this year, Leica Camera USA launched the Leica Women Foto Project, a platform promoting the expansion of diversity and inclusion in photography by highlighting the importance and impact of a woman’s perspective. Three winners and their compelling stories have finally been chosen, with Debi Cornwall, Yana Paskova, and Eva Woolridge besting over 600 submissions across the United States. Each of them will receive $10,000 and a Leica Q2 to tell a story through the female viewpoint. If you’re looking for inspiring and thought-provoking projects by female photographers, these winning series are definitely worth checking out.
Through her Necessary Fictions series, Debi Cornwall “explores the staging and performance of American power in immersive, realistic military wargames.” She photographed a mysterious country called “Atropia” which straddles both fact and fiction. Mock Afghan and Iraqi villages with “cultural role-players” were built on military bases across the United States as hosts of immersive battle scenarios and realistic military exercises for troops set to deploy. For this project, Cornwall’s goal is to examine how the fictions are “deployed and embraced,” and encourage critical inquiry among military and civilian viewers. As a recipient of the award, Cornwall will continue telling the story of Necessary Fictions, as well as examine the blurring of fiction and reality within the “fantasy-industrial complex” following 9/11.
Bulgarian-born, Chicago-bred, and Brooklyn-based photojournalist and writer Yana Paskova was chosen for her series Where Women Rule, which she will continue developing using funding from the award. The project, she says, is “a visual and sociological look at what happens when cultural norms of gender are amended or removed.” She explores this idea through the “all-female societies across the world, where women gather for shelter or in matriarchy” from which “new notions of femininity and masculinity, human bonds, family, and the fluid boundaries of identity” arise.
Rounding out the three winners of the Leica Women Foto Project is self-proclaimed African-American and Chinese-American queer woman Eva Woolridge, whose medically traumatic experiences are encapsulated in a personal project titled The Size of a Grapefruit. This artistic interpretation follows her diagnosis of a grapefruit-sized dermoid cyst, which led to the removal of her right ovary — a course of action that she believes could have been avoided if medical professionals acted promptly in her early consultations. With the help of the Leica Women Foto Project, Woolridge plans to reveal more stories of racial bias against black women across the globe by presenting “visual representation of their perseverance, grit and subsequent empowerment cultivated from their specific challenges.”
According to Leica Camera USA, these compelling projects were carefully chosen by influential women in photography, art, and entertainment industries, including:
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
The Leica Q2s that will be handed to Cornwall, Paskova, and Woolridge will initially be given as year-long loans as part of a legacy program that aims to foster community among award recipients. The cameras will be passed on to the next three winners of the 2020 award, and replacement cameras will be offered to the recipients so they can continue their projects through the Leica lens.
If you’re curious about these projects, mark your calendars. A joint exhibit at the Leica Gallery Boston will be set up from March 5 – April 26, 2020, which will showcase photos from the winning projects by Cornwall, Paskova, and Woolridge.
Visit the Leica Women Foto Project Award website to find out more about the project and this year’s winners.