Leica Camera once again invites professional photographers to submit entries to their international photography competition, the Leica Oskar Barnack Award. Photographers wishing to take part may submit their photographic projects online between January 15th and March 1st 2013. The terms and conditions of entry can be downloaded from www.leica-oskar-barnack-award.com shortly before the start of the competition.

The winner of the 2013 Leica Oskar Barnack Award will receive a Leica M camera with lens worth approximately €10,000 in addition to a cash prize of €5,000. A second honour to the competition will be awarded in the category ‘Leica Oskar Barnack Newcomer Award', for (prospective) professional photographers aged 25 and under. The winner of the first prize in this section will also be awarded a Leica rangefinder camera complete with lens. The awards will be presented in the course of the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie photography festival to be held in Arles, France from the 1st to the 7th of July 2013.

An international jury awards the Leica Oskar Barnack Award/Leica Oskar Barnack Newcomer Award to photographers whose unerring powers of observation capture and express the relationship between men and their environment in a portfolio of up to 12 images. Submissions must be self-contained series of images in which the photographer perceives and documents the interaction between men and their environments with acute vision and contemporary visual style - creative, unobtrusive and groundbreaking.

This year’s jury members are Alain Genestar (Polka Magazine, France), Klavdij Sluban (Photographer, France), Markus Shaden (Publisher and independent Curator, Cologne), Peter Turnley (Photographer, USA) and Karin Rehn-Kaufmann (Artistic director of the Leica Gallery in Salzburg).