Intimacy, Respect and Empathy: Photographer Jane Evelyn Atwood Receives the Dr. Erich Salomon Award

The German Society for Photography honors the French-American photographer for her documentary body of work

Cologne, 20 August 2026 – The German Society for Photography (DGPh) is honoring French-American photographer Jane Evelyn Atwood with the prestigious Dr. Erich Salomon Award. With this distinction, the DGPh recognizes a photographer who has consistently expanded the possibilities of the documentary image. For decades, Atwood’s work has uniquely focused attention on people living at the margins of society. It exemplifies an engaged, ethically reflective form of photography that makes social realities visible and anchors them sustainably in our collective visual memory.

“The Dr. Erich Salomon Award honors exemplary uses of photography in journalism and publishing. For decades, Jane Evelyn Atwood has demonstrated what this means: she makes visible realities of life that would otherwise remain unseen and preserves them in our collective visual memory,” says Ruediger Glatz, Chair of the DGPh Executive Board.

Born in New York in 1947, Atwood has lived in Paris since 1971. She began her photographic career as a self-taught photographer in the mid-1970s. In 1976, using her first camera, she created a series about sex workers on Rue des Lombards in Paris. This was followed by work on transgender people, blind children, people living with HIV and AIDS, and prisoners. Atwood’s photography is characterized by intimacy, respect and empathy.

Her projects develop over long periods of time and are distinguished by a deep sense of trust between photographer and subjects. Through intensive research and a sensitive approach, she enters worlds that would otherwise remain invisible.

Atwood gained particular international attention with her long-term project Too Much Time. Women in Prison, on which she worked from 1989 to 1999. She photographed in around forty prisons in nine countries in Western and Eastern Europe as well as in the United States, gaining access even to extremely difficult-to-access correctional facilities, including death rows in the United States. The project documents the realities of life for incarcerated women and remains one of the most compelling photographic testimonies to women’s prison conditions worldwide.

In addition to her long-term thematic projects, Atwood has documented crises and major events, including the 1995 Kobe earthquake and the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. She describes her working method as “obsessive”: she only opens a new chapter once she is certain that she has fully understood a subject and her own relationship to it—and that her photographs reflect that understanding.

Atwood’s work has been exhibited internationally, and she has frequently published it in book form, including Too Much Time, Women in Prison (2000), Trop de Peines, Femmes en Prison (2000 / 2004), Haïti (2008), Rue des Lombards (2011), and Pigalle People (2018 / 2019).

For her reportage, published in magazines such as LIFE, Geo, Stern, Paris-Match, and The New York Times Magazine, she has received, among others, the W. Eugene Smith Grant (1980), the World Press Photo Award, Daily Life, 3rd Prize, series (1988), the Ernst Haas Award (1994), the Leica Oskar Barnack Award (1997), and the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award (1998). In 2023, she was honored with the Prix Albert Detaille by the Académie des Sciences, Lettres & Arts de Marseille.

Award Ceremony
The award ceremony will take place on October 24, 2026, as part of a festive event in Cologne at the Overstolzensaal of the Museum of Applied Arts Cologne (MAKK). On the same day, the Cultural Award, the Manfred Heiting Medal of Curatorial Excellence in Photography, and the Otto Steinert Prize / DGPh Photography Award will also be presented there.

The Dr. Erich Salomon Award of the German Society for Photography has been presented since 1971 for an “exemplary use of photography in journalism and publishing.” It also commemorates the great photographer of the Weimar Republic, Dr. Erich Salomon, whose work provided major impetus for the development of modern photojournalism.

The award consists of a certificate and a Leica camera and is presented annually. Recipients have included print media, organizations and television professionals, as well as, since 1985, individuals who have made outstanding contributions to photography in journalism and publishing or achieved exceptional accomplishments in photojournalism, including STERN (1971), Robert Frank (1985), Barbara Klemm (1989), Mary Ellen Mark (1994), Reporters sans Frontières (2002), Martin Parr (2006), Letizia Battaglia (2007), Paolo Pellegrin (2013), Josef Koudelka (2015), Stephanie Sinclair (2019), Chris Killip (2020), Hans-Jürgen Burkard (2021), Susan Meiselas (2022), Rafał Milach (2023), Andrea Diefenbach (2024), and Kathy Ryan (2025).

Leica Camera AG is the DGPh’s partner in presenting the Dr. Erich Salomon Award and supports the award each year by presenting a Leica camera.

About the DGPh
The German Society for Photography (DGPh) is a registered association with around 1,200 members throughout Germany and is based in Cologne. The DGPh is committed to promoting photography as a cultural asset and thereby strengthening its social and cultural significance.

Its activities focus on communicating photographic topics to professionals and the wider public, as well as reflecting on current developments such as digitalization, artificial intelligence and new image media. They encompass the diverse fields in which photography is applied, including art, science, education, journalism and publishing, business, and politics.

As a central institution for communicating pioneering achievements in photography, the DGPh presents several prestigious awards each year, including the Kulturpreis (Cultural Award), the Dr. Erich Salomon Award, and the DGPh Manfred Heiting Medal of Curatorial Excellence in Photography.

Press Contact
German Society for Photography (DGPh)
Regina Plaar, Press and Public Relations
regina.plaar@dgph.de, Tel. +49 221 923 20 69
Rheingasse 8–12, 50676 Cologne, www.dgph.de