The Maribor photobook award 2023 organized by The Angry Bat and Društvo za evropsko zavest has its winners!

The photobook award is supported by Mestna občina Maribor, UGM Maribor, Fani&Rozi, Vila Krista Maribor.

Here is the jury decision for this year:

Main Prize

Patricia Morosan: (I) Remember Europe – Fotohof, Salzburg, 2022 (edition of 500)

The main prize goes to Patricia Morosan, a photographer and artist born in Romania in 1984, currently living and working between Berlin and Athens. She studied at the Ostkreuzschule Berlin and the Leipzig Academy of Fine Arts.

The photobook (I) Remember Europe is a photographic research that presents the emotional localisation of places that claim to be the geographical centre of Europe. As there are different methods of calculating the centre, as many as seven countries consider their places to be the geographical centre of Europe. Each of them also has a memorial that proves it. These Greographic Centres of Europe are located in Germany, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and Slovakia. Patricia Morosan visited these places and invited one person from each of these places and gave them a disposable portable camera to take photographs of these places. The collaborators returned the portable cameras to the artist, creating a kaleidoscope of different impressions, from different parts of Europe.

The very thoughtful design and execution of the photobook, combined with the very topical subject matter, convinced the jury to select this particular book for the main prize.

Runner up

Gian Marco Sanna: »Paradise« – Artphilein Editions SA, Paradiso, 2023 (edition of 300)

The second prize of the Maribor Photobook Festival goes to young photographer Gian Marco Sanna, born in 1993, for his book “Paradise”. The accompanying text in Paradise includes a thought by Jorge Luis Borges, “Earth is paradise, but hell does not perceive it”, which perfectly sums up the overall feeling of this complex project. Black and white photographs are mixed with red toned images, giving a dystopian feeling of desolate landscapes that look like a lost paradise. The text is placed in the middle of the book, in such a way that the images are placed in the foreground. The photographs are placed in the book without interruption, on every page; often the red-toned and black-and-white photographs appear in direct confrontation and contrast. The book “Paradise” is conceived in a highly visual way, with the text merely supplementing and guiding the frame context. It is the latter that the jury found particularly effective.

Best Book Award for books published in SE Europe

First of all, we would like to point out that the pool of submissions from South-Eastern Europe is relatively small, which is a testimony to the poor production conditions of photographers and artists from this geographical area – hence the special section of the prize. By far the largest number of submissions or books came from Greece, which clearly has the most favourable conditions for photobook production and also some boutique publishers.

The jury selected as the best photobook from South-Eastern Europe the book by Persephone Michou, a young photographer born in 1995, whose book “I Will Forget You, I Will Love You Again” deals with some of the universal existential questions of human existence, such as interpersonal relationships and the relationship of the individual to memory. Photography is one of the key tools in the modern world for preserving memory. In creating a purely intimate story, the artist has drawn on stories from ancient Greek mythology, which speak of the persistence of memory and are easily applicable to contemporary times.

PHOTOS FROM THE LAST AWARD (2020)