Editing Challenge organised by the German Photographic Academy
Wolfgang Zurborn vs. Frederic Lezmi
Featuring images by Jana Margarete Schuler
Moderated by Prof. Dr Claude W. Sui
ZOOM meeting on 9 December 2026 at 7 pm
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87287750973?pwd=JBD4DEGpDV5IRzNhcitRYqTENlyRoy.1
Meeting ID: 872 8775 0973
Passcode: 302608
The Editing Challenge can also be followed live on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/deutschefotografischeakademie/
A full recording of the Editing Challenge will be published as a video on YouTube. The link will then be available on the DFA website.
In this Zoom talk, Frederic Lezmi and Wolfgang Zurborn will present their book designs featuring the works of Jana Margarete Schuler from the series ‘Zwischen Blut und Glitzer’ and discuss the results with the photographer and the audience. The photobook experts will explain, step by step, how they arrived at their edits for the publication, in order to make the process of book design – with all its questions regarding content and form – easy to follow. In all previous DFA Editing Challenges, it has already been very clearly demonstrated just how much the way we read photographic images depends on their arrangement within a book, and how differently our perception of the world around us can vary as a result.
Jana Margarete Schuler (born 1993) is a documentary photographer based in Germany. She works closely with her subjects, building trust over extended periods of time and thereby creating intimate visual narratives. Schuler’s photographs have been published in VOGUE, Stern, DIE ZEIT, Spiegel and SZ-Magazin, amongst others, and exhibited at international festivals such as the Rencontres d’Arles (France), Photo London (UK) and the Festival della Fotografia Etica (Italy). In December 2024, she was recognised by LensCulture as one of the 25 most important emerging photographers worldwide. In September 2025, she won first prize at the Siena Awards in the ‘Storytelling – Daily Life and Contemporary Issues’ category. PhotoVOGUE currently ranks her among the 150 most influential female photographers and filmmakers worldwide. Together with the author Torben Becker, Schuler founded the “Deutschlandstory” project in August 2026, for which they travel across Germany in an old fire engine, practising street journalism.
Frederic Lezmi is a photographer, designer and photobook curator. He studied Visual Communication at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, as well as Fine Art at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts in Beirut, Lebanon. Frederic Lezmi has published several photobooks, including: ‘Studio Lezmi’, ‘Beyond Borders’, ‘Taksim Calling’ and his ‘Sunday Books’ series. As well as leading international photobook workshops, he teaches photobook design at various universities and faculties in Germany, including Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Hanover University of Applied Sciences and Arts, and the DHBW Ravensburg. He is the artistic director of the PhotoBookMuseum in Cologne, which he founded in 2014 together with Markus Schaden. He is responsible for the curation, design and production of the PhotoBookMuseum’s exhibitions and heads the Dummy Award.
Wolfgang Zurborn, born in 1956, studied at the Bavarian State College of Photography in Munich and at Dortmund University of Applied Sciences. In 1985, he was awarded the DGPh’s Otto Steinert Prize and, in 2008, the German Photobook Prize for his book *Drift*. Exhibitions featuring his work are shown internationally. For 40 years, he has been a co-director of the Lichtblick Gallery in Cologne, and in 2010 he founded the Lichtblick School. A key focus of the teaching programme is the design of photobooks. Together with Markus Schaden (The PhotoBookMuseum), he supports participants in the publication of their photographic projects through a series of ongoing workshops. Many of the photobook dummies produced in these workshops have subsequently been published by renowned publishers.
