The Documentary Photography Awards of the Wüstenrot Foundation are the most important awards of their kind in Germany. Together with the Photographic Collection of the Museum Folkwang in Essen, they have been presented every two years since 1994 including works of young artists from German universities and academies who use contemporary documentary image strategies and forms of representation to question the present.

In the 15th edition of the awards, Nazanin Hafez (b. 1991), Kristina Lenz (b. 1992) & Alex Simon Klug (b. 1991), Malte Uchtmann (b. 1996) and Hannah Wolf (b. 1988) are honored. The artists engage in different ways with existing ‘truths’ about the world that affect society and the individual.

The documentary strategies and forms used here range from documentary-fictional to AI-generated visual worlds. These are technics that move along the edges of the documentary, touching and oscillating with it, without being documentary photographs in the conventional sense.