Opening the email, I am subjugué – good word, wrapping together “convinced”, “under the spell” – by the art in the photographic creation of the three finalists for the 2025 Prix Viviane Esders, Dörte Eißfeldt, Oleksandr Suprun and Bohdan Holomíček featuring in the press release. Prix Viviane Esders honors mature creators currently working in Europe – honors artistic purpose over time, as well as production. This year’s winners hail from, respectively, Germany, Ukraine and Czechia.
God knows, cash prizes will surely be welcome. Most mature persons of the creative persuasion have long shucked all illusion and moulted into creative but regular guys mostly indistinguishable from the vast mass of those with small incomes and clouded perspectives – semantically richer than “prospects”.
All the same, while cash is cheering, it’s also a nagging, banal necessity. So I have to think that the obvious critical seriousness of Prix Viviane Esders choices will be the big, long-lasting buck up for the finalists. Whether a body’s looking at Eißfeldt’s, Suprun’s or Holomíček’s work, the sheer power of the individual’s art in it shines out, reaches out and touches Imagination.
Those are genuine critical eyes what done that choosing.
Photography has always been a tough sell for me. I not only try to slink out of looking at friends’ and acquaintances’ pictures, I mostly avoid photo exhibitions too. The intended art or beauty of a picture is almost always elsewhere than in the picture: it’s in the animation/motivation of the person(s) showing it, in the story which it supposedly illustrates, in the situation the showing person is or was in with or without me or others. Also, in daily practice, a picture is, mostly, either a pense-bête for some circle of ephemeral remembrance or proofs, gages of sincerity: Grandma in her garden togs! How Gramma loved her roses; See, I’m with Tim! Honest, we had a great time! Rolling Stone. People Magazine.
Public photography exhibitions generally run in a bigger but pretty similar ambit.
But not here. There is esthetic intention and there is art is in each picture. In each, a body can get a sense of how it illuminates Imagination: through movement, vision, sound, texture or words or some combination of those.
Dörte Eißfeldt’s camera lens is a forensic tool, bringing forward or distancing, especially, arguments of vision and texture, shade and contour, in a single visual locution. Eißfeldt is quoted in her note, “… Photography means working with fragments of reality … [and] establishing a distinct and intense yet also open connection to the world [and] … [a]llowing all that is wild, dark, intangible and beautiful in an image to preserve or to achieve its impact in an open, stimulating and surprising form…”.
Using the local Ohio-USA-like woods, dales and slope and local folk as his base material and collage as his base technique, Aleksandr Suprun takes on the photographed image as a palette, using its bits and pieces to build both his vision and visual texture and, apparently, from the evident sureness of hand in the pieces, has done since he began working in the mid-Sixties. Suprun, was born and raised in the Soviet Union and still lives independent Ukraine near Kharkiv, destructively besieged by forces of the Russian Federation for the last three years.
Bohdan Holomíček arranges “universally signifying” photographic scenes and characters to fill in where words are inadequate to the story he’s telling. There’s an all-horizons good humor in these stories. I am not one for “national genius” but looking at an, admittedly limited, selection of Holomíček’s tales, I’m thinking there is something of R.U.R.or the Good Soldier Švejk, a calm distance from indeterminate points-of-view that might be wise irony or cruel cynicism, genius or imbecility, gentle correction or brutal condemnation? However it may be, Holomíček’s art is a universal photo album.
Have a look.
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Prix Viviane Esders, established four years ago, and in 2025 “reflecting a spirit of discovery or rediscovery of careers that embody photographic practices of the past forty years”, awards €50000, which includes publishing costs, to the winner. Two runners-up each receive a €5000 cash prize. Click to see online portfolios for Dörte Eißfeldt, Oleksandr Suprun and Bohdan Holomíček.
Eißfeldt, Suprun and Holomíček were among a total 222 candidatures for the prize – this year reaching 32% women and 25 countries in Europe, up from 28% and 17 last year. Forty-two of the candidates were proposed by The Nominators, a new group of photography experts from across Europe involved in the search for relevant artists.
The Prix Viviane Esders jury 2025 includes Viviane Esders herself as president; Damarice Amao, historian of photography and specialist curator for Centre Pompidou, Paris; Antoine de Galbert, collector of contemporary art and arts patron; Arnaud Lévénes, founder and director of La Capsule, a residency program focusing on socialization and creative development in photography, in Le Bourget, France; Robert Pujade, philosopher, writer, art critic; and Marie Robert, chief curator for photography and cinema, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Scheduled for October in Paris, the details of the ceremony have yet to be settled: check the Prix Viviane Esders website.