Polish and Czech photographers among winners of Jerwood/Photoworks awards

Polish photographer Joanna Piotrowska and Czech photographer Tereza Zelenkova are among the three winners of the first Jerwood/Photoworks Awards, a prize dedicated to celebrating new approaches to photography.

Piotrowska, whose latest series Frowst was inspired by family photos, is best known for her exploration into the reoccurrence of historical memory within social and environmental systems, and is set to present further work on psychology and its use in examining private lives at a group exhibition later this year.

As an artist working mainly with black and white photography, Zelenkova’s work is based on “ephemeral and poetic relationships between the individual images”, and plays with the notion of non-linear time. Returning to her native Czech Republic, Zelenkova is set to create a photography series documenting “forgotten biographies, local histories and superstitions”.

The winners were selected from over 400 entries from UK-based photographers, and each received awards of £5,000, a sum intended to support the making of new work for a group exhibition in November 2015.