Welcome to the tenth edition of the PORTRAITS – Hellerau Photography Award.

On the one hand, our new theme Echoes of Truth reflects the various historical, cultural and political layers that have historically covered our founding building, the Festspielhaus Hellerau, over the course of more than a hundred years. It was built as an educational facility for music and rhythm, housed a large exhibition of expressionist painting in the 1920s, a police school during the Nazi dictatorship and a Red Army hospital after the end of the Second World War. After the political turnaround of 1989, the site was renovated in the 1990s and has now been a European Centre for the Arts for twenty years. All these periods have left their mark on Hellerau, and we, the team of the PORTRAITS – Hellerau Photography Award and with us, hundreds of artists with their exhibited works have also left our mark here.On the other hand, we are living in over-politicized times. Here in Dresden, in Saxony, in Germany and in Europe, we are currently facing huge political challenges. Wars, inflation, the rise of the extreme political fringes with their overly simple answers to people’s concerns, most recently a presidential election in the USA in which the focus was less on facts than on populist volume – all of this is leading us towards an era in which truth is devalued as a currency. It only appears in distant echoes, and you have to be very sensitive and look and listen carefully to catch a glimpse of it…

We are currently preparing the competition’s finalist exhibition, which will open on June 26, 2025.
Feel free to visit our pop-up satellite at the Fotoforum Dresden!

 

Every year, catalogues with the works of all finalists are published by the Kunstagentur Dresden. Shipping is free worldwide.

Who we are

The PORTRAITS – Hellerau Photography Award was created in 2015. Our output so far: fifty exhibitions, stunning works by over four hundred international artists and tens of thousands of enthusiastic visitors.