A Chinese Photographer Won! 2023 Leica Oskar Barnack Award Explained — How to Shoot Documentary and Human-Interest Photography?

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 two groups of winning works of 2023 with everyone.

These photos are all drawn from the photographers' surroundings. The photographers used subtraction to unify the visual style of each series while racking their brains to make every photo look completely different. Most importantly, they all embody a humanistic care — these details are very worth learning for photography enthusiasts.

Video

▶ Watch the video tutorial on Bilibili

This is the illustrated companion to the video above. In 2023 the Leica Oskar Barnack Award gave its main prize to Ismail Ferdous's "Sea Beach" and its newcomer award to Ziyi Le's "New Comer". Thomas walks through both winning series in the video; this article turns that commentary into text, paired with keyframe screenshots for easy reference and collection.

01 Two Winning Series: the Beach and the New Comers

The first series, "Sea Beach", comes from New York-based, Bangladesh-born photographer Ismail Ferdous (at 0:49 in the video). He returned to Cox's Bazar in the far south of his home country — the country's most popular seaside resort — and photographed the crowds on the beach at noon every winter day, with flash: tourists, fishermen, vendors and office workers, all manner of lives playing out on this strip of sand.

The second series, "New Comer", turns the lens on young people in China's big cities (at 1:49 in the video): in the midst of youth, they face work, love and life with confused, complicated emotions. In the frame below, everyone around is looking at a phone while he stares straight into the camera — an outsider's sense of estrangement (at 8:59 in the video).

02 Unity: Subtraction in a Photo Series

The first lesson from both series is unity. A coherent series comes from deliberate subtraction: Ferdous pressed the shutter only around noon on sunny winter days and always used flash, so the color and light across the whole series are remarkably consistent (at 2:50 in the video). He shot no sunsets and no blue-hour nights — a single such frame would make the whole series feel chaotic.

Thomas followed the same logic in his own "Glimmer" (Weiguang) series: every frame was shot at night. Making a series cohere often means choosing your weather and light — and simply not shooting when conditions don't match. In the second series, unity lives in proportion, color and emotion: full-body and half-body framings stay within a consistent range, and choosing which emotion to show — joy, confusion or anger — is itself a crucial act of subtraction (at 3:46 in the video).

03 Variation: Refusing the Typological Shortcut

Unity does not mean repetition. As Thomas points out, many photographers take the typological shortcut — dozens of frames with nearly identical compositions — but not every subject suits typology, and documentary series especially call for richer variation (at 4:24 in the video). On a beach it would be easy to end up with the same "everyone standing and staring at the lens" picture over and over; Ferdous's subjects, by contrast, are full of movement.

The cotton-candy vendor above uses a half-body composition echoing pink against pink, color pushed to its purest; another frame catches a mother and a father from behind, each carrying a child; there is also the shell picker — a cyan square right behind him and a red triangle forming in front, building a beautifully structured visual geometry (at 5:27 in the video). A man in formal attire carrying his slippers, the back view of a young man with a handbag — every detail tells a story.

Then there is the man riding a horse in sunglasses, modern and traditional fused in one figure — exaggerated and delightful; starfish gathered by collectors add layers of meaning; foreign tourists appear in half-body frames, not staring blankly at the lens but smiling as they notice small creatures at their feet; the fishermen are caught mid-haul together with their nets, gear and surroundings (at 6:38 in the video). No two frames take the same approach — the rarest quality in a series: never repeating itself.

04 Collision: Tradition and Modernity on the Sand

The deeper theme of the series is the collision of tradition and modernity in Bangladesh, a developing country. Some arrive in suits with briefcases — less like vacationers than business travelers or a corporate retreat; some get chased by the waves in leather shoes; dress ranges from conservative traditional clothing to glamorous outfits to punk styles; some crouch to pick up tiny crabs and shells while luxury hotels and apartments rise in the distance (at 7:13 in the video).

The clash of tradition and modernity, of consumerism and traditional culture, plays out in full on this beach. Sun-umbrella chairs unique to South Asian beaches and a dilapidated pump house give the pictures their strong regional character — unmistakably different from beaches in Europe, America or China. The photographer captured that uniqueness (at 7:56 in the video).

05 New Comer: Metaphors in Props and Light

Photographing young people at home is hard — the results easily blur together. Ziyi Le's solution was to use the props already in each room, woven together with the subject's emotions and state. In one picture the subject is a livestream host, and the environment tells you the profession; in another, about a jobless man, the front legs of a chair have snapped and toppled over — a metaphor for his tilted, dejected place in life at that moment (at 9:12 in the video).

The most brilliant frame is a masterclass in lighting with three distinct sources: the first is the computer screen, lighting his face; the second, Thomas guesses, is a phone aimed at the wall, creating a bright plane that lifts the figure out of the dim room; the third is the open window, letting in lights from the building outside (at 9:57 in the video). The complex light structure mirrors the character's tangled emotions, while his expression stays natural and at ease.

Behind both series lies serious time: "Sea Beach" took four years to create, and the natural states in "New Comer" were never achieved with a quick "may I take your picture" — the photographer invested enormous effort finding different people, talking with them patiently, becoming a friend, letting them drop their guard (at 10:52 in the video). This kind of documentary photography is not superficial street snapping but a way of seeing that reaches the heart of a person and the core of an era — exactly why the Leica Oskar Barnack Award honored both photographers.

1. Subtract first in a series: unify weather, light and shooting time, and be selective with emotions and framing — coherence comes from constraint; 2. Seek variation within unity: refuse the typological shortcut, using gesture, angle, color and props so no two pictures repeat; 3. Props and light are the language of metaphor: a toppled chair or three light sources can describe a person's situation and mood; 4. Documentary photography reaches the heart through time: four years of shooting and long-term communication let subjects drop their guard, and the pictures become natural.

Contest works website:

https://www.leica-oskar-barnack-award.com/en/

Full tutorial list:

Complete Photography Tutorial Index (updated 2024.4.16)

HD video:

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1jn4y1974p/

Award-Winning Works