HGB artists Raisan Hameed and Benjamin Friedle are among the winners of this year’s Aenne Biermann Prize for Contemporary German Photography. Congratulations! The works of the award-winning photographers will be on display from 23 September 2026 in an exhibition at the Museum of Applied Arts in Gera.
Raisan Hameed is being honoured for his work After Image. He successfully completed his Meisterschüler at the HGB in 2025 and currently holds a freelance contract in the field of photography. After Image combines a digital archive of Google Street View images of Iraq with a personal family archive, examining in particular visual gaps, disruptions and fragmentations: The pixelated faces and destroyed panoramas in Street View are juxtaposed with photographs from the family archive, which were damaged during the war in 2003. They thus become traces of war and technological control, demonstrating how visibility is both created and restricted. The work interprets the images as “after-images”, in which bodies no longer appear as stable representations, but as fragile traces, shaped by memory, violence and technology.
Benjamin Friedle receives an Honourable Mention from the jury for his work Words from Images from Photos from Forms. He has been studying in Heidi Specker’s photography class at the HGB since 2025. The award-winning work examines how artificial intelligence dissolves the boundaries between the digital and real visual worlds, and how photography, as an omnipresent language, shapes our perception. Through an interplay of text, image and object, the work explores how algorithmic processes, simulation and storage structures have become central components of contemporary image production.
The Museum of Applied Arts in Gera awards the Aenne Biermann Prize for Contemporary German Photography every two years. The prize commemorates the photographer Aenne Biermann, who was born in Goch in 1898 and lived in Gera from 1920 onwards, whilst also honouring outstanding achievements in contemporary photography. This year, a five-member expert jury selected the winners from 548 entries. The Aenne Biermann Prize is accompanied by prize money, an exhibition at the Museum of Applied Arts in Gera and a publication.