Prix Photoforum 2022

The Prix Photoforum is one of the few photography awards in Switzerland with no limits on nationality, age or career stage, and no determined theme. As a result, each a great diversity of works is exhibited, testifying the richness of the contemporary photographic scene and the multiple forms of the photographic image. The projects selected this year highlight in a striking and singular way the concerns of today’s society, and include many projects dedicated to ecological, political and social concerns. Alongside these projects are works that offer counternarratives of individual or collective memory and present conceptual
research on the photographic medium itself. The jury was particularly impressed in this edition by works that develop a collaborative approach to photography and involve the photographed subjects as well as the viewers in the production process.

The 2022 edition of the Prix Photoforum received proposals from 150 artists and photographers in total. The jury – composed of Julie Jones (Curator of Photography Centre Pompidou Paris), Kabelo Malatsie (Director Kunsthalle Bern), Kathrin Schönegg (Curator/Director C/O Berlin) and Jana Johanna Haeckel (Director, Photoforum Pasquart) – has selected ten artists and photographers for the exhibition of the Prix Photoforum 2022,  including one laureate and one special mention.

The Prix Photoforum 2022, endowed with CHF 5,000, was awarded to the artist Marco Frauchiger for his project „Bringing light into the dark“. It documents a research trip the artist made to Laos, where he searched for artefacts made from bomb material 50 years after the Americans’ “Secret War”. For the photo series, Frauchiger commissioned a local craftsman to make a camera obscura out of this bomb material in order to produce analogue photographs. The results show barely recognisable historical sites of the “Secret War” and subvert the promises of a documentary image practice. At the same time, they pose subtle questions about whose perspective of the world is shown in photo- and war journalism.

The jury gave a special mention to the artist Ronald Pizzoferrato for his project „Kupaiwa/Oil Tree“. The series of images developed in dialogue with the local residents portrays the disastrous ecological and economic situation at Lake Marakaibo in Venezuela, one of the oldest and largest lakes in Latin America.