DIOR Young Talent Awards for Female Students at Universities of Applied Sciences

Debora Brune’s photo series “UNCOOL” examines how bodies are viewed, categorized, and normalized through visual conventions, and challenges the hierarchies of contemporary systems of representation: In 27 color portraits, each titled after a first name, Debora Brune depicts visible disabilities—scars, burns, amputated limbs, blindness, or albinism—without stylization or embellishment. Using neutral backgrounds, direct lighting, and frontal shots, she draws attention to the dynamics of seeing and being seen, and lends the subjects authority rather than symbolism. The images aim to break through the often cautious, sentimentalizing, or exclusionary portrayal of disability in visual culture. Debora Brune, who uses a wheelchair herself, combines personal experience in her work with aesthetic maturity and a resolute, sober visual language that reveals the tension between individual presence and collective perception in a society that often looks away.

Debora Brune, born in 1996, lives and works in Berlin and London. After earning her bachelor’s degree, she also completed her master’s degree in photography at Fachhochschule Dortmund.

In her series “ORIGIO,” Milena Schilling presents black-and-white and color photographs taken over a period of three years, for which she choreographed 45 nude subjects aged 18 to 73 with different body types in Lake Constance: After intensive preparation—nearly nine hours per image—the participants dove into water that was only 12 °C; they had just a few minutes per dive for a single, unedited photo, and they rehearsed the sequences beforehand on land. The images combine a poetic, almost sacred tranquility with a celebration of physical diversity and a thematic connection to the element of water: The starting point was the realization that humans are 60 to 70% water and that 71% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water. As the source of all life and a unifying element, Milena Schilling therefore placed water at the center of her work.

Milena Schilling, also born in 1996, lives and works in Konstanz. She earned her bachelor’s degree at the University of Konstanz and her master’s degree in photography at Fachhochschule Dortmund.