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Berlin photographer Lucia Jost has been building Capital Daughters since 2022 — a Portrait of Humanity Award-winning series that refuses to arrive at a fixed idea of who the Berlin woman is.
The myth surrounding the Berlin woman is complex. Lucia Jost's own words, from the project statement, establish the frame immediately: "Who she is is difficult to grasp." Capital Daughters does not resolve that difficulty. It sits inside it. Twenty-one portraits made across the city since 2022 — apartments, rooftops, carnivals, graffiti-tagged walls, museum floors, shower curtains, grassy parks — accumulate as a portrait of a generation rather than a type.
The range is the point. Three women hold their ground in front of a fairground ferris wheel in mesh tops and platform shoes. A rooftop shot places one sitter against the Fernsehturm in high summer, denim jumpsuit and red earrings, the city skyline entirely legible behind her. A pregnant woman stands in a doorway in a striped robe, looking directly into the lens with no particular expression on offer. The series threads motherhood as one of its emancipation stories, and not the only one.
The film-grain palette (warm, slightly faded, square-format) is consistent across every setting, so the carnival, the squat bedroom, the tiled bathroom, and the blooming park read as parts of the same city. Jost is photographing people she lives near, and the closeness shows. The image titled "Motherhood," a woman bathing a toddler behind a transparent shower curtain, tender and matter-of-fact at once, carries no caption in the published edit. It does not need one.
Capital Daughters won the Portrait of Humanity Award Vol.5, judged by the British Journal of Photography / 1854. The award is the series' headline credential, but Jost's own framing matters more: "A homage to the Berlin woman of today" and a look at "the multifaceted stories of emancipation in my hometown." The word emancipation is doing real work there: not liberation-narrative, but the ongoing, uneven, daily negotiation of living as a woman in a particular city at a particular moment.
"In the end you will never really know," Jost writes. That refusal of resolution is also a formal choice. The series has no declared endpoint and no tidy thesis. It goes on.
