After ten successful years, the early career Talents program has been comprehensively restructured: Talents is now the C/O Berlin Talent Award.

Effective immediately, the C/O Berlin Talent Award will honor one outstanding young photographer and art critic each year, awarding 10,000 EUR in total (7,000 EUR in the photography category and 3,000 EUR in the art criticism category). In addition to the cash award, the recipient will be given increased space within the exhibition program, presenting a solo exhibition at C/O Berlin. His or her work will be honored with a comprehensive, individualized catalog, which will also showcase the winning critic and allow him or her to enter into a dialog with the photographic works.

The C/O Berlin Talent Award is the only prize of its kind in Europe. It showcases emerging photographers and art critics under 35, accompanying them on their creative journey and offering a starting point for international exhibitions. The expert jury will nominate the candidates for the selection process. As well as choosing the prizewinners in the categories of photography and art criticism, four participants will be shortlisted. Their works will be published in the C/O Berlin newspaper and presented online as part of the collaboration between C/O Berlin and the photography magazine Der Greif.

C/O Berlin is delighted to award the first C/O Berlin Talent Award in the photography category to the Austrian artist Stefanie Moshammer (b. 1988, Vienna). Stefanie Moshammer and her work won over this year’s jury members—Diane Dufour (LE BAL, Paris), Shoair Mavlian (Tate Modern, London), Aaron Schuman (freelance critic and curator, London), Anne-Marie Beckmann (Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation) and Ann-Christin Bertrand (C/O Berlin)—as an extraordinary example of the current debate on the discourse surrounding the topic of New Documentary Photography. Her solo exhibition at C/O Berlin will allow her to present her work to a broad public at an international level. ARTE will support the C/O Berlin Talent Award as media partner and the prizewinner’s exhibition.

Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques (b. 1983, France), Joscha Steffens (b. 1981, the Netherlands), Stephan Bögel (b. 1983, Germany), and Mafalda Rakoš (b. 1994, Austria) were selected for the shortlist.

Stefanie Moshammer’s photographs—comprised of different media—illuminate the complexity of our contemporary perception. Using existing materials, she develops her own photographs, charts pictures using Google Maps and uses film footage and video as well as fictional shots and images from her own imagination. In doing so, she creates new forms of documentation while combining fictional and narrative moments and touches on fundamental photographic themes: What is reality? What is fiction? Which truths does the photographic image convey?

Stefanie Moshammer was born in Vienna in 1988, where she continues to live and work. After graduating from the Fashion School Vienna, she completed her bachelor of arts in visual communication and photography at the University of Art and Design Linz as well as a course in photojournalism at the Danish School of Media and Journalism in Aarhus. Moshammer received a nomination within the Rencontres d’Arles festival, was selected as a FOAM Talent and nominated for the ING Unseen Talent Award at the Unseen Photo Fair in Amsterdam. Her photographs have been published in numerous magazines including i-D, Collector Daily, GUP Magazine, It’s Nice That, ZEITmagazin, New York magazine, FOAM Talent Issue, and VICE.