16/10/2025
Maribor photobook award 2025 RESULTS
The decision for the jury was very hard this year since they had to look through 196 books!
📣 Jury Decision 2025
🏆 The main prize is shared between Julia Mejnertsen and JT.
📖 Julia Mejnertsen (HUN), Dalpine/Fiebre Photobook, 2024
Julia Mejnertsen explores her mother’s relationship to hunting. The book moves us deeply because of its subject – it is difficult to connect birth and killing.
The book could even begin on its last page, where, beneath the image of a breastfeeding woman, we read:
“... Hunting has become my passion. I never get tired of it. It’s not like giving birth to my first child, but it’s similar ...”
🎞️ Throughout the book, the beautiful design creates a cinematic flow; we follow photographs, drawings, and archival images.
The work feels especially relevant in a time when the news confronts us daily with war and killing.
📘 JT, Wild Grass, La Maison de Z, 2024
JT grew up in China during the 1980s and witnessed the devastating consequences of the one-child policy.
The soft, almost coverless book leads us through haunting photographs of abandoned children and both official and unofficial orphanages across China.
🖤 The mostly black-and-white photographs neither condemn nor merely document.
The people depicted are intensely present, while the empty black pages, through their silence, draw us into the depth of their tragic situation.
🏅 Best Book Award
for books published in Southeastern Europe
📚 Sanja Bistričić Srića: If This Is True, What Else Must Be?, Biblioteka Prozori, 2025
Sanja Bistričić Srića conceived her book as a collage of photographs and questions taken from fashion magazines, interwoven with drawings.
The text, through repetition, eludes any clear answer, creating a sense of unattainable meaning.
The hard, robust cover prevents an easy glance inside – even that, however, suggests another layer of meaning.
✊ Best Book Award
on the theme of Protest
📖 Daniel Chatard, NIEMANDSLAND, The Eriskay Connection, 2024
Daniel Chatard explores the impact of brown coal extraction in Germany’s Rhineland, where the energy giant RWE operates some of the largest open-cast lignite mines in Europe – notably Hambach and Garzweiler.
🌍 These mines are not only among the continent’s biggest sources of CO₂ emissions but have also drastically reshaped the landscape, swallowing fields, forests, and entire villages.
📷 The photobook traces the history of protest since 1997, combining archival data, personal photographs, and texts to offer a deeper insight into the struggle against the ecological catastrophe of our time.
✨ Special Mentions (12)
📘 KISETSU – Petra Kapš, self published, 2025
📘 One bed two blankets eighty-five rules – Sabine Hess + Nicolas Polli, Ciao press, 2023
📘 Flashpoint! Protest Photography in Print, 1950–Present – Various photographers, 10x10 Photobooks, 2024
📘 LOST – Anonymous images from the Myanmar Photo Archive, Fraglich Publishing / Myanmar Photo Archive, 2025
📘 To tell my real intentions, I want to eat only haze like a hermit – Katherine Longly, Three Books, 2025
📘 Zelzele – Sabiha Cimen, Jason Eskenazi, Red Hook Editions, 2025
📘 Bird, Plane, Butterfly – Antoinette Nausikaa, J*p Sam Books, 2025
📘 Waiting for the Snow – Katarzyna and Marianne Wasowska, Yogurt Editions, 2025
📘 The Wizard of Ave – Kevin Cooley, The Eriskay Connection, 2024
📘 Radiations of War – Yana Kononova, XYZ Books + Fotodok, 2025
📘 L'élégance de vos absences / Vol.1 Comme un vivant porte-bonheur – Gilles Mercier, self published, 2025
📘 Far Away from Home: the Voices, the Body and the Periphery – Hristina Tasheva, self published, 2023
💫 Congratulations to all the winners and participants!
And also a big thank you again to all publishers and photographers who sent their books!
