PORTRAITS - HELLERAU Photography Award 2025

30.08.2025 - 06.12.2025

Since PORTRAITS was founded in 2015, the jury, which this year included renowned photographer Ute Mahler, has selected works by over 450 artists from more than 50 countries for numerous exhibitions in Dresden and awarded prize money totalling 100,000 €.

The motto of the current 10th PORTRAITS year is "Echoes of Truth". The 23 photographic positions from the final round can be seen in the annual exhibition at the Technische Sammlungen Dresden from 27 June to 19 October.

In HELLERAU, Pasha Kritchko, the 2025 residency prize winner, will be showing his photographic work "Map of Memories" in its entirety for the first time from 30 August to 6 December. With these images, he documents the Belarusian resistance against the regime after the rigged presidential elections of 2020. While the regime systematically destroys archives and criminalises even symbols of resistance, Kritchko creates his own poetic counter-map. A "Map of Memories" that defies political boundaries and understands memory as an act of resistance. Next door to Pasha Kritchko, Iranian-born artist Nazanin Hafez, last year's PORTRAITS Residency Award winner, will be exhibiting her new works.

The exhibition is open on all event days from one hour before the first event.

The Festspielhaus Hellerau, the centre of the garden city Hellerau founded in 1906, has been enthroned on Dresden's "Green Hill" for over 100 years. The PORTRAITS - Hellerau Photography Award has been based here since 2015. Founded by the then artistic director Dieter Jaenicke and the Dresden journalist Martin Morgenstern and supported by numerous art-loving partners, patrons and sponsors, a major international competition for contemporary portrait photography has since been organised and hundreds of photographic works from over forty countries have been publicly exhibited.

For the Saxon state capital of Dresden, the PORTRAITS Award has since become an important and widely recognised exhibition project. The annual finalist exhibition, numerous accompanying events (in cooperation with the Konrad Adenauer Foundation or the Fotoforum Dresden, for example), guided tours, artist talks and - since 2017 - the annual "satellite exhibitions", which are organised by smaller galleries and exhibition spaces and frame the main programme, make the PORTRAITS Award the largest European competition for portrait photography. With the help of the main sponsor, the international auditing and consulting firm Forvis Mazars, prizes totalling 10,000 € can be awarded each year, including a residency prize, which includes an artistic residency at the Festspielhaus Hellerau, the results of which are presented in a separate exhibition the following year.

Two jurors of the first show, photographer Matthias Creutziger and art historian Dr Katja Schumann, summarised how the PORTRAITS initiators and organisers see the competition, what they look for each year and what they make their curative maxim: "We are looking for psychograms in the form of portraits. We expect a new visual language that attempts to break away from role models. We want to feel what kind of photographer is behind the pictures... In short, we expect works by passionate photographers who engage with the medium of photography itself."

The jury, which includes photographers as well as collectors, curators, photo historians and picture editors and is currently chaired by Hellerau director Carena Schlewitt, changes its composition every year. Former members include Prof Matthias Flügge, Daniel Blochwitz (CH), Christiane Mennicke-Schwarz and Susanne Altmann as well as photographers Julian Röder, Carla van de Puttelaar (NL), Francesca Cesari (IT), Matthew Hamon (US) and Tomasz Lewandowski (PL/GER). Curator and art historian Caroline von Courten was recruited for the 2025 edition in November 2024

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