The Prize for Young Photojournalism was established on the initiative of Hansjoachim Nierentz in collaboration with photojournalist Eberhard Grames. It ran between 1991 and 2003 and was sponsored by Agfa. The competition, which attracted entries from around 2,800 young photojournalists over the years, aimed to discover images which told stories; pictures of individuals illustrating the many states of humanity: the perpetual suffering, joy, war, disease and suppression.
Image series by the prize winners and other outstanding individual shots from the seven competitions were given to the German Historical Museum in spring 2007. This new acquisition gave rise to the current exhibition, which reveals the world of the nineties from the perspective of young photojournalism. The young photographers witnessed it all - from the Israeli-Palestine conflict to the Balkan crisis, Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq, the changes brought on by the collapse of the Soviet Union and German reunification. Their potent images of human joy, of birth, disease and death emphasise both the power and the crucial importance of documentary photography.
Those initiating this prize were primarily concerned with the photographs which lay bare a bygone era and the individuals who lived during this period - images which have the potential to go down in history in the best sense of the word