Jen Osborne
Featuring: Jen Osborne, Anna Neubauer, Priya Suresh Kambli, Koral Carballo
6th Annual Leica Women Foto Project Award Winners: Priya Suresh Kambli for Archive as Companion, Jennifer Osborne for Fairy Creek, Koral Carballo for Blood Summons, and Anna Neubauer for Ashes from Stone.
Canada Awardee: Jennifer Osborne
“Fairy Creek”
Camped out in a cluster of tents and vehicles at various blockades along a series of remote roads on Southern Vancouver Island, Canada, a diverse group of activists united to protect old-growth forests near Fairy Creek in the summer of 2020.
The activists were asked to leave the area on April 1, 2021, after British Columbia Supreme Court judge, Justice Verhoeven, approved an injunction filed by Teal-Jones Group. Police enforcement began nearly seven weeks later. That’s when I began photographing the protests. Months of police tactics followed, and The Fairy Creek Blockade became the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history by August 2021.
Over 1,200 activists were arrested there. The forests around Port Renfrew—a town that recently began billing itself as the “Tall Tree Capital of Canada”—are the last coastal forests of their kind on the planet. Big-tree enthusiasts have found exceptionally large western hemlocks, massive Douglas firs, and yellow cedars there. Some of these trees are the longest-lived life forms in Canada at more than 1,500 years old. It only takes minutes to fell a 1,500-year-old-tree, and for activists, every second they had to unite and defend those forests counts. My photo series features life inside those blockades—which are now dispersed—as well as the trees they worked so hard to protect.
Jen Osborne (1984) is a Canadian photographer currently based in Los Angeles, California. Her career started in 2007 with a yearlong residency at Fabrica’s COLORS Magazine in Treviso, Italy. She has since published and exhibited photographs and videos internationally.
Osborne won a 2025 Leica Women Foto Project Award for her photo series about old-growth forest blockades in Fairy Creek. She was also shortlisted for a Sony World Photography Award in 2024 for her wildland fire coverage in Alberta, Canada. She received a grant from Carleton University in 2021 to complete a video documentary about Canada’s horse meat industry. It has since toured to more than ten film festivals around the world.
Mexico Awardee: Koral Carballo
“Blood Summons”
Koral Carballo’s photographic essays blend photography and oral history to explore the search for identity among Afro-descendant and mestizo communities in Veracruz, Mexico. Through powerful imagery, she uncovers the roots of complex family trauma, inviting viewers to reflect on their own connections to the past. Her project Blood Summons (or La Sangre Llama), a popular Mexican saying referring to the call to search for one’s ancestors, represents both her personal journey and a broader exploration of historical injustices. With this work, Carballo calls for reparation, aiming to foster connection rather than division, and invites viewers to engage with these stories and their own histories.
US Awardee: Priya Suresh Kambli
“Archive as Companion”
Priya Suresh Kambli’s work is deeply personal and rooted in the context of the migrant experience. Inspired by an exhibition of vernacular hand-painted Indian studio portraits from The Alkazi Foundation, she began intervening with her family archive to explore themes of identity, memory, and belonging. Over the course of her twenty-year practice, Priya has revisited, reimagined, and recontextualized family portraits and heirlooms, building an archive that connects her to both her ancestral roots and her adopted land. Through her work, she reflects on absence and loss, navigating family dynamics to document their lives with a thoughtful and composed narrative.
UK Awardee: Anna Neubauer
“Ashes from Stone”
Anna Neubauer’s ongoing documentary project, Ashes from Stone, is a powerful photo essay that portrays individuals who defy societal norms of beauty, strength, and identity. Through striking portraits, Neubauer showcases people from diverse cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds in empowered settings, amplifying marginalized voices and encouraging audiences to rethink traditional views of femininity and strength. The project challenges stereotypes, redefines beauty, and embraces narratives around family, relationships, and motherhood. Each photograph is accompanied by a personal narrative, deepening the connection with and humanizing the subjects, fostering empathy, and promoting a greater understanding of diversity.
Anna Neubauer is an Austrian photographer based in London, United Kingdom. After experiencing the narrow concepts of beauty in the industry, she began her journey capturing what truly matters to her: stories of self-love, acceptance, and resilience. In 2021, Anna was named Adobe Rising Star of Photography. She has worked with clients like Barbie, Condé Nast, Leica, Canon, Yoto, Abercrombie & Fitch, Adobe, Harper’s Bazaar, and 500px/Getty Images, and her work has been featured in international publications.
Artist Bios
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Priya Kambli received her BFA at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette and an MFA from the University of Houston. She is currently Professor of Art at Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri. Kambli’s work inadvertently examines the question asked by her son Kavi at age three; did she belong to two different worlds, since she spoke two different languages? The essence of his question continues to be a driving force in her art making. In her work, Kambli has always strived to understand the formation and erasure of identity that is an inevitable part of the migrant experience, exploring the resulting fragmentation of family, identity, and culture. Kambli’s artwork has been exhibited, published, collected and reviewed in the national and international photographic community. Her work has been exhibited at the Nelson Atkins Museum, Kansas City, MO; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Arts, Overland Park, KS; Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington, VA; National Portrait Gallery’s Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize, 2021 London, United Kingdom. Her work has been published in Aperture – summer issue #251- Being and Becoming: Asian in America; PIX photography quarterly magazine Passages: a subcontinental imaginary; Photography: A Feminist History by Emma Lewis.
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Jen Osborne (1984) is a Canadian photographer who has published and exhibited photographs and videos internationally. Her career started in 2007 with a yearlong work contract at Fabrica’s COLORS Magazine. Since then, her work has graced the pages of Stern, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, GQ, Mother Jones, Vice, Vanity Fair Italy, and IoDonna, to name a few. Osborne has also shown at venues including Visa pour l’Image 2022 and 2016, Athens Photo Festival 2020, Aperture Gallery, The Museum de l’Elysée, the Denver Biennial, and Arles 2010. Osborne’s recent projects of interest revolve around Climate Change. She photographs wildland fires and their aftermath. She also spent months documenting public efforts to save ancient old-growth forests near Port Renfrew, Canada. Outside of photography, Osborne is passionate about horseback riding, avant-garde piano and fitness. It is her goal to become the world’s premier fire photographer.
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Koral Carballo (born in Poza Rica, Veracruz, Mexico, 1987) is a documentary photographer, photojournalist, and visual artist based in Mexico. Through photography, oral storytelling, and the archive Carballo investigates new narratives and visual representations of themes that intersect in the contemporary and historical context, such as necropolitical violence, Afro-descendence, and its relationship to memory. Carballo has exhibited her work in Argentina, Bolivia, Canada, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, Morocco, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, The United States, and Uruguay. Koral is co-founder of the International Festival of Journalistic and Documentary Photography Mirar Distinto in Veracruz, Mexico. She is currently collaborates with Ruda Collective, and is an Artist from the National System in Mexico.
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Anna Neubauer is an Austrian photographer based in London, United Kingdom. After experiencing the narrow concepts of beauty in the industry, she began her journey towards capturing what truly matters to her – stories of self-love, acceptance, and resilience. Anna thinks the less diversity people see in their everyday lives, the more disconcerting they might find it, and that’s something she can change. Anna is working towards figuring out how to make viewers see strength in vulnerability and rawness in imperfection and she wants her work to be a bold and beautiful statement of rebellion against the confines of beauty standards. In 2021, Anna Neubauer was named Adobe Rising Star of Photography. She has since worked with clients like Barbie, Condé Nast, Leica, Canon, Yoto, Abercrombie & Fitch, Adobe, Harper’s Bazaar and 500px/Getty Images, and her work has been featured in international publications and media like British Vogue, The Guardian, Forbes, CNN, The Today Show, The Times, It’s Nice That, Cosmopolitan, Buzzfeed, and others.
Organizations
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Ignite your passion for photography with Leica Camera at Photoville
Experience the world of Leica photography at Photoville through a selection of curated photo walks and panels. From Seeing in Monochrome to Moments in Focus, you’ll experience Leica photography and guidance by acclaimed Leica photographers.
Leica Camera is founded on a tradition of optical excellence and a conscious focus on the essentials of exquisite image making. For over a century, the brand has motivated visual storytelling through the quintessential union of craftsmanship, design and experience, providing essential tools that influence the art, culture, and creation of photography. Photoville attendees can see this firsthand at the Leica Pavilion, which will showcase a one-of-a-kind photographic experience through a variety of interactive Leica activities designed to ignite your passion for photography.
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The Leica Women Foto Project serves to empower the female perspective and its impact on today’s visual stories. We believe the shape of a story is reactive to the storyteller’s perspective, developing a narrative that too often is reflective of individual truths. The Leica Women Foto Project encourages diversity and inclusion in visual storytelling to amplify voices typically underrepresented in photography, discovering the breadth of shapes formed by a single story. Conceived in 2019, the initiative has evolved to offer cash awards and business opportunities and Leica equipment to serve the female perspective in the world of photography.
