On the occasion of the 2019 edition of the Photolux Festival. International Biennal of Photography, Photolux promote the 3rd edition of the Photolux Award, an international award dedicated to emergent photography.
Directors and curators of some of the most relevant international institutions and magazines dedicated to photography are invited to present three photographers with a project related to the theme to which the next edition of the festival is dedicated.
The award is aimed to recognize the best emergent photographers, giving them a broad visibility and chance for exhibit their works. The winning project will be produced by Photolux and shown in one of the official venues of the Festival.

The winner of Photolux Award 2019 is Valentyn Odnoviun with Surveillance, presented and proposed by Lydia Dorner (Musée de l’Elysée, Losanna)
MOTIVATION: Based on a serial system and on a rigorous and controlled conceptual structure, Surveillance by Valentyn Odnoviun reveals diverse and complementary levels of reading: an immediate, apparent, reference to astronomy photographs, one of the themes of the festival; a wide formal and chromatic variety of the single image; a profound political significance both in the choice of specific subjects – the walls of prisons of the former Soviet bloc – and in the ability to visualize the universal idea of power, control and surveillance.

The jury composed by Tobia Bezzola (Museo d’arte della Svizzera Italiana), Nanda van den Berg (Huis Marseille) and Matteo Balduzzi (MUFOCO. Museo Fotografia Contemporanea), awarded with a Honorable Mention the two following projects:
La Renaissance by Mohamed Keita
Nominator:Cristiana Perrella (Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato)
MOTIVATION: La Renaissance by Mohammed Keita uses a simple and straightforward photography, without any formal excess and the theory-indulgent vibe of so much of contemporary research, with a strong autobiographical reference. The immediacy of the shot and the great compositional effectiveness of the images position the work within the everyday practices of photography, in the most contemporary sense, that is the flow of images loaded onto instagram, summarizing many of its aesthetic values.
This World and Others Like It byDrew Nikonowicz
Nominator: Hinde Haest (FOAM, Amsterdam)
MOTIVATION: In  This World and Others Like It the author moves with extreme freedom among the genres and techniques of photography, producing a coherent visual research, with a dry black and white colouring and an impeccable formal structure. In the realization of the impossibility of any division between real and virtual in contemporary society, the research of Drew Nikonowicz investigates at the same time the notion of landscape and topography, the analog and digital technologies of vision, the continuous evolution of the concepts of representation and perception.