Folkwang Prize for Barbara Klemm
Folkwang Prize for Barbara Klemm
March 3, 2021
© Nikolaus Schölzel
This year’s International Folkwang Prize honours the lifetime achievement of Leica photographer Barbara Klemm. The annual award, which was established by the Folkwang Museum in 2010, is endowed with € 10,000. The award ceremony takes place on October 4, 2021.
Barbara Klemm ranks among Germany’s most important photographers of the post-war era and beyond. Her portraits and documentary images – whether they captured pivotal political moments or everyday scenes – have shaped the country’s collective visual memory over the course of several decades. One of her most famous photographs, the Socialist Fraternal Kiss between SED party leader Erich Honecker and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev of 1979, has been published around the world.
Barbara Klemm was born in 1939 in the German city of Münster and raised in Karlsruhe, where she trained as a photographer’s apprentice (1955 to 1958). In 1959 she started to freelance at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung – eventually working as the newspaper’s editorial photographer for politics and culture from 1970 to 2004.
She has been a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Arts since 1992, and an Honorary Professor of Photography at the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences since 2000. Barbara Klemm is also a recipient of the Leica Hall of Fame Award.
For further details visit Museum Folkwang
Barbara Klemm ranks among Germany’s most important photographers of the post-war era and beyond. Her portraits and documentary images – whether they captured pivotal political moments or everyday scenes – have shaped the country’s collective visual memory over the course of several decades. One of her most famous photographs, the Socialist Fraternal Kiss between SED party leader Erich Honecker and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev of 1979, has been published around the world.
Barbara Klemm was born in 1939 in the German city of Münster and raised in Karlsruhe, where she trained as a photographer’s apprentice (1955 to 1958). In 1959 she started to freelance at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung – eventually working as the newspaper’s editorial photographer for politics and culture from 1970 to 2004.
She has been a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Arts since 1992, and an Honorary Professor of Photography at the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences since 2000. Barbara Klemm is also a recipient of the Leica Hall of Fame Award.
For further details visit Museum Folkwang
© Nikolaus Schölzel