Alejandro Cegarra has been named winner of the 2025 Leica Oskar Barnack Award (LOBA), while Serghei Duve received the Newcomer of the Year title at the ceremony in Wetzlar, Germany.
Now in its 45th year, the awards celebrate documentary photography that explores humanity’s relationship with its environment. More than 300 submissions, nominated by 120 international experts from 50 countries, were reviewed by a five-member jury before the winners were announced.
As winner of the Main Prize, Venezuelan-born, Mexico-based photographer Alejandro Cegarra was awarded €40,000 and Leica equipment worth €10,000 for his project The Two Walls, which explored the lives of migrants and refugees on the US-Mexico border. “I wanted to concentrate on humanity and universally human emotions,” Cegarra said, describing the black-and-white project he worked on from 2018 to 2025, which resulted in more than 35,000 images, 20 of which were chosen for the final LOBA series. The award also makes him the first photographer to progress from LOBA Newcomer Award winner (2014) to the Main Prize.
This year’s Newcomer Award, which carries a €10,000 prize and a Leica Q3, went to 26-year-old German-Moldovan photographer Serghei Duve for Bright Memory, a personal exploration of his family’s ties to Transnistria, a breakaway region of Moldova still unrecognised internationally. “My work is about telling personal stories, but also about laying everything bare to draw attention to broader themes,” he explained. “I chose the title for this work after my grandfather died in March 2023 and one of my relatives offered his condolences with precisely these Russian words, ‘Swetlaja Pamiat’. Even if it’s actually just a cliché in Russian, these words touched me, and I found them to be very appropriate.”
All shortlisted projects are now on display at the Ernst Leitz Museum in Wetzlar and will later tour Leica Galleries worldwide. Further details can be found on Leica’s website.
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