Photographer Hakbong Kwon has been awarded the Gold Prize in the Fine Art category at the international photography competition “PX3 2025 (Prix de la Photographie, Paris)” held in Paris, France, and was simultaneously honored as the “Fine Art Photographer of the Year – Professional,” the top award in the category.
 
Recognized alongside the IPA International Photography Awards, the Sony World Photography Awards (SWPA), and the Tokyo International Foto Awards (TIFA) as one of the “world’s four major photography competitions,” PX3 has been held annually since 2007, receiving tens of thousands of submissions from over 100 countries. 

Kwon’s award-winning series ‘The Independence Movement: Layered Gazes’ visually overlays the history of Korea’s March 1st Movement and independence struggle onto contemporary urban landscapes, creating works in which the perspectives of the past pose questions to the present.

The project began at the end of 2024 amid political turmoil in South Korea. Confronted more deeply by the turbulence of internal power than by external threats, the artist was prompted to reexamine the nation’s identity and roots, finding an answer in the spirit of the March 1st Movement of 1919 and the independence struggle.
 
The recurring figure in the work—a girl dressed in the Ewha School uniform—evokes the image of independence activist Yu Gwan-sun but serves as a visual metaphor representing not a single person but the countless unnamed independence fighters who disappeared from history.  

By juxtaposing historic sites of the independence movement—such as the Independence Hall of Korea, Seodaemun Prison, Yu Gwan-sun’s birthplace, and Samilmun Gate—with contemporary landscapes, Kwon revives the past not as a relic preserved in a museum but as a living memory directed toward the present.

He stated, “Photography is both a record and a question, both representation and resistance,” adding, “It’s not simply about reproducing images of the past, but about asking how we remember.”
 
The PX3 judging panel described Kwon’s work as “a powerful project that elevates political and historical messages into an exceptional visual language” and praised it for “delicately achieving a balance between memory and the present, between art and resistance.” 

Hakbong Kwon plans to continue his long-term project documenting historic sites of Korea’s independence movement at home and abroad, and is preparing to publish a photobook and hold overseas exhibitions based on his award-winning series.

References

• 출판교육문화뉴스, 권학봉 사진작가, PX3 2025 파인아트 부문 금상 및 ‘올해의 사진가’ 수상, 2025.09.19
• Prix de la Photographie, Paris (PX3)