Peter-Matthias Gaede

A top-rated and critically acclaimed collection, 'Towards the Horizon' won the Alfred Fried Photography Award 2014. Emil Gataullin sees what others overlook. He creates magic out of nothing. From the most banal everyday scenes he manages to form images that seduce his audience, putting them under an extraordinary spell. Russian photographer Emil Gataullin is a master of lyrical black-and-white photography. His theme is the Russian village: a life far away from big decisions and sensations. Gataullin's work is at the same time documentary and photographic poem; it dances on the thin line between deliberate sparseness, objectivity and restraint, and affectionate composition. Gataullin's pictures neither glorify nor denigrate. They are a declaration of love for a Russia beyond Moscow. They prescribe nothing for the viewer - and are all the more mysterious for that.

The 25th anniversary of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is a good reason to put the topic emphatically into the public focus. UNICEF Germany and GEO, with the support of the world's best photographers and Edition Lammerhuber, do exactly that in this joint pro-bono project. In 40 photographic reports from 15 years, a selection of particularly striking pictures from the UNICEF Photo of the Year competition forms a fervent appeal to respect the rights of the child and to guarantee every girl and boy in the world a childhood in dignity. The volume is edited by Jurgen Heraeus, the Chairman of the German Committee of UNICEF, and Peter-Matthias Gaede, long-serving Editor-in-Chief of GEO. We the Children draws attention to the suffering and hardships, but also to the wishes and dreams of today's children. We the Children is a book full of hope for a child-oriented world.