The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation has awarded the HfG Fotoförderpreis 2023 to Madlen Strebel for her project “Two Hours Per Hour”. The prize is given annually to students at the Offenbach University of Art and Design (Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach am Main, HfG) who engage with the medium of photography. As part of its commitment to supporting young artists, the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation has been awarding the €3,000 prize annually since 2010. The award ceremony took place during the traditional HfG open house tour in Offenbach on 14 July. This year’s jury members were Anne-Marie Beckmann, Director of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation, and Peter Sillem, Frankfurt gallerist. 

In their statement, the jury wrote: in her work, Madlen Strebel explores the pursuit of beauty ideals and self-optimisation through cheap and questionable beauty correction products available in online shops. The promise behind these is the supposedly quick correction of self-perceived deficits and short-term satisfaction through the consumption of supposed bargains. Strebel’s colour portraits show young people who have each selected and tested one of the fast beauty products. She confronts the speed and transience of these items and their purchase with a processual, slow photographic procedure, capturing her protagonists with an old analogue Hasselblad medium format camera. The larger-than-life, unframed prints are reminiscent of passport photos in their directness and relentlessness. At the same time, they open up points of reference in art history, from the classical portrait of a ruler to positions in recent photographic history. This gives Madlen Strebel’s work an additional historical dimension, which refers to the millennia-old pursuit of ideals through questionable and sometimes bizarre methods.

Madlen Strebel was born in Mainz in 1996 and is currently in her sixth semester at the Department of Art at the HfG.

Furthermore, the jury gave a special mention to the work “Haufen” by Lea Kulens. From the perspective of a pile of packaging material left over from the installation of the exhibition, she photographs into the space using several pinhole cameras and hangs these images as huge photo strips in the exhibition space. In this way, Kulens reverses the usual line of vision: the marginal, the seemingly worthless and useless, looks back at us. This also results in a socio-political reading of the work, which finds its way out of the protected and closed exhibition context into the public space.

Lea Kulens was born in Hanau in 1997 and has been studying at the art department at the HfG since 2017. 

About the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation

The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation is a non-profit organisation based in Frankfurt/Main that is dedicated to collecting, exhibiting and promoting contemporary photography. It is responsible for the further development and presentation of the Art Collection Deutsche Börse, which now comprises over 2,300 photographic works by around 160 artists from 33 nations. In its exhibition space in Eschborn near Frankfurt/Main, it shows several exhibitions a year that are open to the public. Supporting young artists is a particular concern of the foundation, which promotes them in many ways: with awards, scholarships, or through funding programmes and cooperations with various museums, universities, associations, or other institutions. These include the exhibition series “La jeune photographie allemande” with the Goethe Institut Paris, the Talent programme of the Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam Foam, or the scholarship programme of the organisation Künstlerhilfe Frankfurt e. V. Together with the Photographers’ Gallery in London, it awards the renowned Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize every year. Furthermore, the foundation supports exhibition projects of international museums and institutions as well as the development of platforms for academic dialogue and research on the medium of photography.