A huge congratulations to Ursula Schulz-Dornburg for being awarded the 2025 Bernd and Hilla Becher Prize (main) through the state capital of Düsseldorf, Germany!
“The international Bernd and Hilla Becher Prize for 2025, a €15,000. award, goes to Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, born in 1938. Schulz-Dornburg belongs to a generation of photographers whose work has only been (re-)discovered in German-speaking countries in recent years. She has lived and worked in Düsseldorf since 1969. With her work, Schulz-Dornburg pursues a cultural-historical anthropological interest, which she describes as the “verticality of time”.”
“The jury was convinced by Ursula Schulz-Dornburg’s long-standing work and her artistic articulation in her documentary, political and poetic photographic works. Schulz-Dornburg studied photography and journalism in Munich from 1959 to 1960 and then developed an independent visual language that, in terms of formal aspects such as the isolation of image elements, reduction, typology and observation, has numerous parallels to the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher. She repeatedly travelled to countries such as Armenia, Kazakhstan, Yemen, Syria, Indonesia and Iraq, besides China, Nepal, Russia and Turkey, where she documented landscape changes and the decline of a political system, be they ancient or contemporary. Schulz-Dornburg has had international exhibitions in recent years, including at the Maison européenne de la photographie in Paris, MEP, (2019/2020), the British Museum (2018), the Städel Museum in Frankfurt (2018) and the Tate Modern in London (2013 and 2014).”