Now in its fifth year, the CDS/Honickman First Book Prize contest rewards a photographer with a grant of $3000 and the publication of a book of photography. This year, William Eggleston judged the competition, choosing Benjamin Lowy as the winner from among more than 200 entries.

Lowy is a war and feature photographer with Reportage by Getty Images. He won for his upcoming book Iraq / Perspectives, which is composed of "photographs taken through Humvee windows and military-issue night vision goggles," which, the organisers say, "capture the desolation of a war-ravaged Iraq as well as the tension and anxiety of both U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians."

Eggleston comments: "Although I like the other photographers' work, I felt that the Iraqi pictures made a better book. Benjamin's work is an opportunity to see as an American soldier sees when in Iraq-nobody's ever shown that, especially through night vision goggles."

Lowy started working on Perspectives in 2005, when he was "being driven from an assignment-an endeavor that took two cars and four heavily armed Iraqi guards," he says. "Iraq was a land of blast walls and barbed wire fences. I made my first image of a concrete blast wall through the window of my armored car that day. My only view of Iraq was through inches-thick bulletproof glass."

He adds: "The images are not intimate. Metaphorically speaking, the windows represent a barrier that impedes dialogue. The pictures show a fragment of Iraqi daily life taken by a transient passenger in a Humvee; yet they are a window to a world where work, play, tension, grief, survival, and everything in between is as familiar as the events of our own lives."

Lowy also photographed Iraq through military-issued night vision goggles, which were "firmly attached to his camera by means of duct tape, dental floss, and occasionally, chewing gum," says the photographer. The goal, he explains, was to reveal a more menacing nocturnal version of Iraq's abandoned streets, cowering civilians, and anxious soldiers.

An Iraqi man surrenders to a joint late-night raid by U.S. soldiers and Iraqi Sunni "Concerned Citizens" in an area south of Baghdad, August 1, 2007. Due to a high level of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in the area, the company-size raiding party walked five kilometers to the target in complete darkness, raided the target houses, detained questionable suspects, and walked five kilometers back to waiting Humvees. Image © Benjamin Lowy, 2007.

Iraq / Perspectives will be published later this year by Duke University Press in association with CDS Books of the Center for Documentary Studies. "This collection of photographs made in Iraq over a six-year period will be Lowy's first book," say the organisers.

Visit benlowy.com.