Creative, encouraging, and courageous – The German Photographic Society is granting the Dr Erich Salomon Award to Kathy Ryan

Press Release
Cologne, August 14, 2025

The German Photographic Society (DGPh) is awarding the prestigious Dr. Erich Salomon Prize 2025 to American director of photography, curator, and photographer Kathy Ryan. With this award, the society honors her creative, outstanding, inspiring, and courageous work spanning almost four decades.

As longtime director of photography at The New York Times Magazine, Kathy Ryan has been a pioneer of combining fine art photography with photojournalism and so played a key role in defining the visual identity of the magazine. 

Ryan is known for her courage, unique instinct, and eye for powerful images, which she uses to highlight the unexpected. She commissioned both photojournalists and fine art photographers—established personalities as well as emerging talents—for major assignments. Thanks to her openness and exceptional talent for weaving photography with storytelling, she shaped the magazine’s visual direction. Ryan embraced the potential of photography to go beyond illustrating the text, allowing it to become a powerful, independent form of expression.

"Over the past decades, Kathy Ryan has achieved outstanding results. As the director of photography at the renowned New York Times Magazine, she has promoted creative and innovative working methods in editorial photography. As a mentor and source of inspiration, she has shaped the much-discussed convergence of content and aesthetics with her unique understanding of the narrative power and social relevance of images, having an impact far beyond the magazine’s boundaries." says jury member Miriam Zlobinski (member of the board of the DGPh History and Archives Section).

Some of the world's best commissioned photographic works in the categories of reportage, portrait, still life, and conceptual photography were created this way. Many of the photo essays published by the New York Times Magazine under Ryan's leadership remain memorable to this day—, such as Sebastião Salgado's 1991 work on the Kuwaiti oil fields, Paolo Pellegrin's work “How Did Darfur Happen” about the genocide in Sudan (2004), and Stephanie Sinclair's (2008) series “The Young Women of the F.L.D.S.,” documenting the polygamous Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Kathy Ryan was the driving force behind all these and many other significant stories. 

In 2014, Ryan—herself also a photographer—published her first photo book, Office Romance, once again demonstrating her remarkable ability to merge photojournalism and fine art photography. As a driving force for new ideas and formats, she also initiated the video series Great Performers, beginning in 2010 with 14 Actors Acting. The series was honored with two News and Documentary Emmy Awards and received several further nominations.

The jury, consisting of representatives of the DGPh Executive Board and two external experts—this year Simone Klein (art advisor) and Hans-Michael Koetzle (author, journalist, and curator)—selected the winner in a multi-stage process from a large number of nominations submitted by DGPh members. By awarding the Dr. Erich Salomon Prize to Kathy Ryan, the DGPh honors an outstanding representative of editorial photography. Through her work with images and her collaboration with photographers, she has significantly raised public awareness of the potential of photography as a medium in terms of content and aesthetics.

Kathy Ryan has received numerous awards, including the Griffin Museum's Lifetime Achievement Award (2007), the Royal Photographic Society's annual award for outstanding contributions to photography (2012), the Center for Photography in Woodstock's Vision Award (2014), and the 2015 Lucie Award for Photo Editor of the Year. In 2023, she gave the annual lecture of the Alfred Stieglitz Society at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in November 2024, she was honored by the International Center for Photography at the ICP Spotlights benefit event. 

The Dr. Erich Salomon Award will be granted to Kathy Ryan on September 27, 2025, during a festive event in Cologne in the Stiftersaal of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum. 

On the same day, the 2025 Culture Award and the DGPh Manfred Heiting Medal of Curatorial Excellence in Photography will also be presented at the event.

The Dr. Erich Salomon Prize of the German Photographic Society has been awarded since 1971 in recognition of “exemplary use of photography in journalism.” It also serves to memorialize the great photographer of the Weimar Republic, Dr Erich Salomon, whose work had a great impetus on modern photojournalism. The prize consists of a certificate and a Leica camera and is awarded annually. Among the recipients are print media, organizations, and television professionals, and since 1985, personalities who have made notable contributions to photography in journalism or achieved outstanding work in photojournalism. Past honorees include STERN (1971), Robert Frank (1985), Barbara Klemm (1989), Mary Ellen Mark (1994), Reporters sans Frontières (2002), Martin Parr (2006), Letizia Battaglia (2007), Paolo Pellegrin (2013), Josef Koudelka (2015), Stephanie Sinclair (2019), Chris Killip (2020), Hans-Jürgen Burkard (2021), Susan Meiselas (2022), Rafał Milach (2023), and Andrea Diefenbach (2024).

The DGPh's partner in awarding the Dr. Erich Salomon Prize is Leica Camera AG, which supports the prize each year by presenting a high-quality Leica camera.

Contact:
Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie e. V. (DGPh)
Regina Plaar (Press & Public Relations)
Tel.: +49(0)221 923 20 69
regina.plaar@dgph.de