Photography Tutorial · 2024-09-01

A Chinese Photographer Made the Shortlist! 2024 Leica Photography Award Works Appreciation + Grand Prize Predictions!

The Leica Oskar Barnack Award is a world-class documentary and human-interest photography contest of a very high standard.

In today's photography tutorial, Thomas will appreciate and learn from the 12 shortlisted works of 2024 with everyone, including Chinese photographer Tong Niu's visual presentation of the express delivery industry — learning together how to tell stories with photos.

A Chinese Photographer Made the Shortlist! 2024 Leica Photography Award Works Appreciation + Grand Prize Predictions! · Fig. 1

Video

▶ Watch the video tutorial on Bilibili

This is the illustrated companion to the video above. The Leica Oscar Barnack Award (LOBA) is an international documentary prize Thomas has followed for years; this episode walks through all 12 shortlisted series of 2024 — from Chinese couriers and Iranian women to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and the global new-energy industry. The five chapters below group the works by theme with keyframe screenshots, so you can quickly grasp each series and the award's overall direction.

A Chinese Photographer Made the Shortlist! 2024 Leica Photography Award Works Appreciation + Grand Prize Predictions! · Fig. 2

01 The Award's Direction: Serious Topics and Series Storytelling

Organized by Leica, the Oscar Barnack Award shares a sensibility with World Press Photo: it centers documentary photography and gravitates toward serious global topics — environment, war, disaster, urbanization. What makes it especially worth a hobbyist's attention is how it demonstrates series storytelling — using a set of photographs to tell one story and the complex social issues behind it (at 0:48 in the video).

A Chinese Photographer Made the Shortlist! 2024 Leica Photography Award Works Appreciation + Grand Prize Predictions! · Fig. 3

All 12 shortlisted series can be viewed on the LOBA website, each with complete images and text. Read together, the direction is clear as ever: serious topics, long-term commitment, and deeply reported series storytelling remain this world-class award's consistent taste (at 1:26 in the video).

02 Couriers and Iranian Women: Color in the Service of Story

The first series is 'Express Delivery' by the Chinese photographer Tong Niu: born in 1998, he used large format to document the courier industry in Jiangsu, showing the urban-rural transformation and the rural population flowing into cities. His own mother was a courier, and by apprenticing among workers he first earned their trust — so the pictures reach inside sorting stations and dormitories, and even follow couriers home for Spring Festival to their left-behind children — a remarkably complete portrait of couriers' lives between village and metropolis (at 1:47 in the video).

A Chinese Photographer Made the Shortlist! 2024 Leica Photography Award Works Appreciation + Grand Prize Predictions! · Fig. 4

The second series, by Forough Alaei, covers Iran's women's rights movement. Unlike the repressed Iran narratives familiar from other contests, these pictures are deliberately vivid and bright — showing a free, vital side of Iranian women: dancers, restaurant managers, motorcycle racers, mechanics, stunt performers... Yet the metaphors of gesture and setting carry an undertone of unease, pointing to the country's tangled religious and historical legacy (at 3:16 in the video).

A Chinese Photographer Made the Shortlist! 2024 Leica Photography Award Works Appreciation + Grand Prize Predictions! · Fig. 5

03 Conflict Shown Obliquely: Nagorno-Karabakh, a Great River, the Caucasus

Anush Babajanyan's series follows people displaced by the Armenia–Azerbaijan conflict: lives in transit, daily moments amid hardship, children eating. It confirms the dominant approach to depicting war today — skip the violent frontline frames and let the circumstances of the affected indirectly reveal the cruelty of war and the tangled ethnic tensions behind it (at 4:30 in the video).

A Chinese Photographer Made the Shortlist! 2024 Leica Photography Award Works Appreciation + Grand Prize Predictions! · Fig. 6

The British photojournalist Emily Garthwaite worked along the Tigris: 1,900 kilometers from the upper source to the Iraqi delta, probing the Middle East's tangled politics, ethnic relations, borders and shifting geography. This ancient river of civilization now also suffers environmental disaster, so the series holds ecology, people, environment and politics in one frame (at 5:51 in the video).

A Chinese Photographer Made the Shortlist! 2024 Leica Photography Award Works Appreciation + Grand Prize Predictions! · Fig. 7

Ksenia Ivanova examines the long-running conflicts of the South Caucasus. Her method is the prevailing paradigm: no bloodshed shown directly, but an oppressive mood, desaturated palette, complicated expressions and gestures, and symbol-laden scenes balanced between candid and staged, conveying how local destinies have been rewritten — a tendency shared across this year's whole shortlist (at 7:02 in the video).

A Chinese Photographer Made the Shortlist! 2024 Leica Photography Award Works Appreciation + Grand Prize Predictions! · Fig. 8

04 Homelands Elsewhere: Moldova, Empty Scenes, Paradise Lost

Maria Guțu of Moldova (born 1996) presents 'Homeland': with the economy drained, about a quarter of Moldovans work abroad and many children grow up without their parents — the photographer herself was raised by grandparents. Her pictures carry a poetic sense of roots and home; the expressions, bearing and tonal control are all superb, and Thomas counts the series a strong contender for the grand prize. It also proves a point: work stands out when it engages the themes closest to you — that connection gives depth no tourist's view can reach (at 8:41 in the video).

A Chinese Photographer Made the Shortlist! 2024 Leica Photography Award Works Appreciation + Grand Prize Predictions! · Fig. 9

The Brazilian photographer Lucas Lenci's 'Inattention Era' pictures empty public spaces and giant LED advertising: when the senses are permanently overloaded, such spaces become metaphors for information we cannot process. Thomas does offer a caveat, though — lecture halls and stadium scoreboards show information people actually need, a slight drift from the 'overload' theme; expanding a series for variety's sake is not always a plus (at 10:27 in the video).

A Chinese Photographer Made the Shortlist! 2024 Leica Photography Award Works Appreciation + Grand Prize Predictions! · Fig. 10

'Paradise Lost' is by Adriana Loureiro Fernández, born in 1988 in Venezuela: over roughly ten years she photographed her own country — poverty, inflation and ubiquitous violence pressing on daily life — yet within these hardships she also captured people's deep attachment to their land and home (at 11:38 in the video).

A Chinese Photographer Made the Shortlist! 2024 Leica Photography Award Works Appreciation + Grand Prize Predictions! · Fig. 11

05 Ecological Wounds and the Prize Predictions

The next series turn their lenses on ecology: Sara Meneses photographs a dormant Mexican volcano where illegal logging and invasive species have ravaged the slopes — for locals who hold the forest sacred, what is shaken is not just the environment but a worldview and a way of life; Davide Monteleone's 'Critical Minerals' traces copper and lithium to Chile, the Congo and Indonesia, asking what price the new-energy industry exacts at its sources — how to build a sustainable future without repeating old mistakes is the question these works share (at 12:52 in the video).

A Chinese Photographer Made the Shortlist! 2024 Leica Photography Award Works Appreciation + Grand Prize Predictions! · Fig. 12

Ingmar Björn Nolting from Germany (born 1995) focuses on the social changes and conflicts stirred by Germany's 2045 carbon-neutrality goal: the environment is being damaged, yet the transition to sustainable energy itself sparks protests, industrial upheaval and social division. Thomas especially admires its many-sided presentation — don't assert good or bad from a single direction; deliver, as this photographer does, a complicated portrait (at 13:36 in the video).

A Chinese Photographer Made the Shortlist! 2024 Leica Photography Award Works Appreciation + Grand Prize Predictions! · Fig. 13

The final series, 'It's All in My Head' by Nigeria's Etinosa Yvonne, uses collage and multiple exposure to layer the portraits of survivors of violence and terrorism over empty scenes or emotive landscapes — some lost family to terrorists, others were accused of witchcraft and ostracized. The portraits are at once evidence of trauma and testimony to their struggle to carry on (at 15:05 in the video).

A Chinese Photographer Made the Shortlist! 2024 Leica Photography Award Works Appreciation + Grand Prize Predictions! · Fig. 14

The prediction: this year's obvious direction is two series on climate change and the new-energy industry reaching the final round — and unlike the celebratory takes of recent years, they aim at the industry's negative impacts and complicated questions — art is inseparable from its moment. Meanwhile series like 'Homeland' from Moldova, strong in both craft and emotion, are Thomas's picks to contend for the grand prize and the newcomer award (at 16:03 in the video).

1. Series storytelling is the Barnack Award's core strength — a set of photos must tell one complete story; 2. Shoot what you're connected to: a courier's son photographs couriers, a left-behind child photographs left-behind children; 3. To show conflict, don't shoot the fighting — displaced lives convey war's cruelty better than battlefields; 4. Color always serves the story: Iran's high saturation and the Caucasus' low saturation are the same restraint.