Library Award Winner 2025 EN

Why do we smoke? In “PLEASURE TO BURN”, photographers Carlotta Steinkamp and Fabian Niebauer get to the bottom of this question. The authors, both smokers themselves, refrain from moralizing. Through ironically humorous exaggerations, romanticizing and yet absurd images, they draw their very own perception of what is probably the most casual addiction in today’s society.

‘Epitome’ by Kyiv-based artist Vic Bakin combines photographs from his archive with recent images made in war-torn areas, all printed in a makeshift darkroom in his apartment. Collectively, the entangled images create a personal visual poem exploring themes of fragility, beauty, masculinity, war and uncertainty.

Frida Forever is a photobook exploring life with chronic illness contrasted with the freedom of youth. The book intertwines photographic self-portraits and staged compositions with energetic snapshots in an original work that uses a raw yet playful photographic style to tell a powerful, personal, and vulnerable story.

In 2012, Frida leaned against a railing on a bridge, which broke, causing her to fall 4.5 meters onto asphalt, breaking her back. Since then, she has been paraplegic and reliant on a wheelchair. In 2018, doctors discovered she also has a cellular abnormality that causes the formation of large, dead calcium deposits. As a result, she has spent much of her adult life in and out of hospitals, undergoing more than 100 surgeries, along with numerous medical treatments and radiation therapy.
During her many hospital stays, she has photographed herself, the hospital space, and her surroundings.

In 1667 a 12-year-old girl, Gertrud Svensdotter, was accused of walking on water in Älvdalen, Sweden. This event marked the beginning of the Swedish witch-hunts, a period of mass hysteria and horror in Älvdalen and its neighbouring regions. The forthcoming book ‘Gertrud’ by artist Maja Daniels uses photography to reconfigure the history and myth of these events, igniting a contemporary dialogue around Gertrud.

When Danish artist André Viking was a child, his father, an amateur bodybuilder, was imprisoned. In his absence, family photo albums took on a tender and heartbreaking role. Hello “Soul Mate” presents a selection of these photographs, accompanied by love letters written from prison by his father.

Hello “Soul Mate” is a book that offers insight into the social issue of incarnation and its entanglement with private life. It presents a reconstructed private archive to the public, inviting reflections on time, memory, and identity.

Looking at My Brother is the first monograph by German-Dutch photographer Julian Slagman. In this book, Slagman presents work made over the past ten years, photographing his two younger brothers, Mats and Jonah, growing up navigating adolescence and brotherhood.

From individual portraits to shared moments, the images offer a poignant exploration of childhood, growth, and the passage of time. Intimate compositions reveal moments that are by turns pensive and playful, wild and serene. The work deals with the vulnerability of the body and the brutality of the scars that Mats suffered after his scoliosis surgery. These physical reminders juxtapose with the resilience and strength embodied by both brothers. Through the book, Slagman delves into the vulnerable relationship between photography and time, inviting us to witness the tender moments of connection, and a chronicle of brotherhood.

“Lüderitz is German Heimat. Lüderitz was to become a new Heimat for the Germans. Lüderitz left its Heimat behind and took the Heimat of another people.”

The photobook “Lüderitz” is set in two places that are around 12,000 kilometers apart and yet share the same name: Lüderitz in northern Saxony-Anhalt and Lüderitz in southwestern Namibia. The former is the origin of the von Lüderitz family, from which the merchant Adolf Lüderitz later emerged. In 1883, he laid the foundation for the consequential colonization of what is now Namibia by fraudulently acquiring land. The starting point was a place named after him: Lüderitz. From then on, this was to be the new home for German settlers who followed the colonial promises of money and habitat to what was then known as “German South West Africa”. Until 1915, the country was under the violent “protection” of the German Reich and was at the same time the site of rich diamond deposits and the scene of the first genocide in the 20th century.

‘Murmurings of the Skin’ is an exploration of the human connection to the body, the intersection of bodies and technology and the human need for physical contact. Over nearly eight years, Olivia Arthur has been making work that looks at people’s relationship with their bodies, what it means to feel comfortable in one’s own skin, and the importance of touch and intimacy. This work has included a series about young people, physicality and sexuality, stability and robotics, about touch, gestures, and solitude in COVID times. The work was triggered by her own pregnancy and the birth of her two children, images of whom appear throughout the series.

In October 2021, photographer Chantal Seitz sent a letter to her partner’s brother, Collin Davis, who has been incarcerated in California since 2005. By asking him the simple question, “What do you want to see?”, she began a correspondence that enabled him to point her camera at the outside world. The exchange between an incarcerated person and someone on the outside reveals how the penal system dictates who can see what and how they are allowed to see it, but placing Collin indirectly behind the camera resists this control. It is an artistic and journalistic approach to telling a family member’s story. Their collaboration – consisting of Collin’s image requests, the photos Chantal sent in return, and the traces of their restricted communication – lessens the separation between prison and the outside world and returns some of the agency that has been taken from him.

“In Hungary, we grew up with a generational anxiety about how a man can’t connect to the world through his emotions, and I want to change this. While I celebrate the skin, body, friendship, trust, and life in general—with all its ups and downs—‘There is a Big River, in Which There is a Big Island, in Which There is a Lake, in Which There is an Island, in Which There is a Small House, Where a Life is Growing in a Womb’ is my first step toward articulating how I believe we are connected.” — András Ladocsi

Yes! Please submit as many different books as possible! There is no limit to the number of books that each publisher or bookmaker can submit.

Yes. Please make sure to fill out a separate submission form for each book, though. Thanks!

Yes! As long as your book has been published between March 2024 and March 2025 in an edition of at least 100 copies you are eligible to apply. An ISBN number is not required.

No. The Fotobus Library Award is meant for published books that have a print run of at least 100 copies. Please send your photo book dummy to our good friends at the fabulous Dummy Award!

No. All submitted books will become part of the mobile Fotobus Library and will be intensively studied, discussed and loved forever.

No. We only support photographic work.

Yes. The core of the work must be photographic. Other elements such as texts, found images, documents, comics, paintings, illustrations, drawings, etc. can also be used.

It is possible to submit text based books to our mobile Fotobus Library. We are grateful and will read your book! Unfortunately the Fotobus Library Award will only consider photography based books, though.

Yes.

Yes, photo books by two or more authors are permitted.

No. You can only submit a book once.