EXHIBITION – BXL/Germaine Van Parys Prize 2025.

For the second year in a row, Géopolis is a partner of the Germaine Van Parys Prize, a prize initiated by the City of Brussels to promote and support the work of women photographers.

For this occasion, and very temporarily, Géopolis moves away from major global issues and takes a little distance from its usual photojournalism projects by presenting the work—focused on Brussels—of the three award-winning laureates:

• Constance Proux, Winner of the Germaine Van Parys Award 2025
Constance Proux carried out a project within a language school located in the heart of Brussels, where she has been learning Dutch for two years. Throughout the year, she regularly met with a group of students, with whom she tirelessly repeated the same words, syllables, and sounds. Despite a rudimentary shared vocabulary, they shared intimate stories. The participants, with diverse and sometimes complex life paths, explore together—particularly through staged scenes—the way we try to understand and be understood, and how learning a language runs through us and transforms us.

• Eloïse Brunet, Winner of the Discovery Award
Eloïse Brunet’s project developed in a residential care home for young girls removed from their family environments. Her project explores how to translate their daily lives, viewpoints, and aspirations into images while respecting their anonymity. Together, they invented forms to get around the constraint of the absence of faces while revealing the complicity, intimacy, and bond that gradually developed between them.

• Amélie Testenoire-Lafayette, Winner of the Discovery Award
Amélie Testenoire Lafayette explores representations of masculinity by reversing the power dynamics usually associated with the male gaze. At a time of rising masculinisms, her work projects a gentler, more soothing masculinity, far from dominant codes of virility, by building with her models images that reconcile vulnerability, intimacy, and new possibilities of representation.

Espace Géopolis, 58/60 rue des Tanneurs, 1000 Brussels

05-19.12.2025

06-18.01.2026

Free admission

Tue – Sun: 1:00 PM – 5:30 PM

Meet the winners of the Germaine Van Parys Prize on 10 January

As part of the exhibition programme for the Germaine Van Parys Prize 2025, initiated by the City of Brussels in collaboration with Géopolis, we are pleased to invite you to an afternoon meeting with the prize-winning photographers. This prize aims to address the lack of diversity in the photography profession by promoting women and highlighting their work. The first grant, the Germaine Van Parys Prize, is intended for professional photographers, while the Discovery Prize is aimed at young women graduates in photography from the City of Brussels schools.

Join us on 10 January to hear Constance Proux, winner of the Germaine Van Parys Award 2025, Eloïse Brunet, winner of the Discovery Award, and Amélie Testenoire-Lafayette, second winner of the Discovery Award, explain their photos in their own words and have the chance to discover the artworks through the artists’ eyes.

Saturday, 10 January

3 PM – 5 PM

Free admission