Leica has unveiled the 12 photographers shortlisted for its 2026 Oskar Barnack Award (LOBA), one of photography's longest-running and most generously funded prizes. And while all the work is predictably excellent, I have to admit: I found initially skimming the list a little disorienting.
Saher Alghorra's Witnessing Gaza documents a war in its full brutality: scarcity, starvation, violence, loss. A few names down the alphabetical list sits Todd Antony's black-and-white study of buzkashi, the Central Asian sport in which horsemen fight over a headless goat carcass.
Both are, by any reasonable definition, excellent photography. Both are also competing for the same prize, judged against the same criteria, on the same afternoon in October. That's not really Leica's fault; it's baked into pretty much every major photography award. But it's still worth thinking about, I think.
LOBA's mission
LOBA aims to recognize photographers who capture the relationship between people and their environment, which is a pretty broad remit. But there's no escaping the fact that breadth has a cost.
When Alghorra's series sits on the same shortlist as Antony's, or as Laila AnnMarie Stevens's tender Clayton Sisterhood Project about her own family building a life in North Carolina, the jury isn't just comparing photographs; it's comparing categories of human experience.
Is a perfectly composed, technically daring image of a goat-wrestling contest "better" or "worse" than a raw, urgent image from inside a warzone? That question is near-impossible to answer, and yet five judges are going to have to answer some version of it anyway.
Conflict and crisis
This year's list makes the tension unusually visible because it leans so heavily toward conflict and crisis.
Valery Melnikov's Mariupol: Open Wounds returns to the aftermath of the 2022 siege of the Ukrainian city. Anush Babajanyan documents the Aral Sea's collapse and the communities adapting around it.
Set against that, gentler work like William Keo's Extramuros, a study of French banlieue youth, or David Sládek's two-decade portrait of one Slovakian village, risk looking slight… even when they aren't.
Again, this isn't an issue unique to LOBA. World Press Photo, the Sony World Photography Awards, Prix Pictet – practically every major contest with a general remit has the same structural issue.
Interestingly, the newly launched Women in Photography Grant avoids it entirely, at least for its first year, by judging a project proposal rather than a finished body of work – there's nothing yet to weigh against anything else.
That winner will be announced alongside the Main Prize and Newcomer Award on October 08 at a ceremony at the World of Leica in Wetzlar, with all 12 shortlisted series going on show afterwards at the Ernst Leitz Museum until February 04 2027.
Ultimately, whomever wins the Main Prize this October, the real result of this shortlist may simply be a useful, uncomfortable reminder.
Photography contests aren't judging photographs in isolation. They're judging what we, collectively, think photography is for in the first place.
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