Jury - Life Framer

A PRESTIGIOUS
JUDGING PANEL

Our jury is comprised of world-class photographers, curators, agency directors and editors. They select a shortlist and winning photographers, as well as providing feedback.

Sian Davey

Siân Davey is a celebrated British photographer who draws on her experiences as a psychotherapist and mother to investigate psychological landscapes.

Much of her work centers on family, community, youth and love – topics she first combined in her intimate and personal project Looking for Alice, in which she documented the growing up of her daughter Alice who has Down’s Syndrome. The series and subsequent monograph won her numerous accolades, culminating in the Paris Photo-Aperture Best Book Award and a shortlisting for the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Book Award in 2016, and positioned her as a sought-after portrait photographer and storyteller. Her most recent work The Garden furthers these themes – using her family garden as a metaphorical device to explore the complexities of community.

Her work is held in collections at the Science Museum and V&A in London, The Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol and The French National Collection in Paris, and she has won prizes including the Taylor Wessing National Portrait Prize, the Prix Elysée, the Royal Photographic Society Hood Medal Award, and the Arnold Newman Award for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture.

Marta Weiss

Marta Weiss is Curator of Photography at the Victoria & Albert (V&A) Museum in London, which she joined in 2007 after two years in the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

She holds a BA in the history of art from Harvard and an MA and PhD from Princeton in the same field, with a focus on the history of photography.

Developing and caring for a world-leading archive of over 800,000 photographic works, she has curated a range of exhibitions on topics such as contemporary Middle Eastern photography and the works of Julia Margaret Cameron, managed the opening of the final phase of the V&A’s Photography Centre, and published books under the V&A’s publishing imprint – Autofocus: The Car in Photography, and Making it Up: Photographic Fictions.

Todd Antony

Todd Antony is a multi-award winning advertising and fine art photographer from New Zealand whose memorable work is hard to pigeonhole.

Across subject matter as diverse as amputee football teams in Sierra Leone, Japanese truck driving culture, cheerleading retirees in Arizona and boundary-pushing Bolivian female climbers there are perhaps two unifying aspects – a flawless technical execution, bringing exquisite details and color to the fore, and a compulsion to tell stories of ordinary people living fascinating lives.

His singular style has led to representation in the UK, US, France and Australia, and advertising work for some of the world’s largest companies in Samsung, the BBC, Sony, Sky TV and Coors. He has won accolades from the American Photography Awards, IPA, Creative Review and AOP, and has been included in the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize and multiple times in Lurzer’s Archive 200 Best Advertising Photographers Worldwide.

Hengki Koentjoro

Hengki Koentjoro is an Indonesian fine art photographer whose beautiful work explores “the spectral domain that lies amidst the shades of black and white”.

His tranquil, minimalist landscapes are borne from a meticulous approach in which he searches for the spiritual in the physical. In his recent series, In the Garden of Summits and Air, he captures the mountains of Java in expansive and dramatic compositions, that are spacious, dreamlike and endlessly beautiful.

He has won countless awards from institutions such as PX3, Black and White Magazine, IPA and Hasselblad, the latter for which he has been an ambassador for several years. He is represented by galleries in Japan, the US, the Netherlands and Germany.

Lauryn Hill

Lauryn Hill is a photo editor at WIRED Magazine and contributor to American Photography 39 and Photo Lucinda’s Critical Mass.

In addition to commissioning features for print and web, she also manages acquired imagery for the front of the book and collaborates across departments to direct the flow of assets throughout the organization. As the world becomes increasingly mobile, her role at WIRED, which is historically known as a technology magazine, is to push the boundary for how imagery is presented on all platforms. Videos, gifs, vertical formats and traditional photography are all a part of what makes an innovative visual landscape.

She has also participated in Review Santa, Palm Springs Portfolio Review, Diversify Photo Review and ASMP-MSP Portfolio Reviews as a reviewer.

Melissa Farlow

Melissa Farlow is a Pulitzer Prize-winning documentary photographer who has worked extensively for National Geographic magazine telling stories of the environment.

Having studied and later taught photojournalism, she is known for her personal approach when photographing people, with features in renowned publications such as Smithsonian, LIFE, Marie Claire, GEO, Sierra, and The Nature Conservancy. Her passion for animal advocacy and in-depth storytelling led to the acclaimed book Wild at Heart, in which she documents the plight of courageous young people working to protect wild mustangs in the Western United States.

Passionate about helping others develop their photographic voice, she has lead workshops in Italy, Switzerland, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, taught at Nat Geo Photo Camps, and served on the faculty of the renowned Missouri Photo Workshop.

Thomas Jackson

Thomas Jackson is a celebrated American installation photographer who creates kinetic and awe-inspiring imagery through a singular experimental process.

He is best known for ambitious, meticulously staged scenes in which bright sculptures interact with natural landscapes. Working with unexpected everyday materials – fabric, straws, post-it notes, ring binders – he arranges them based on the principles of self-organizing ‘emergent’ systems in nature such as termite mounds, locust swarms and bird murmurations. The resulting long-exposure images are both visually dazzling and a dichotomy of ideas: the natural and the manufactured, the simple and the complex, the real and the imagined.

Jackson has worked with organization such as Polaroid and Adobe, been featured in publications such as Harper’s, The New Yorker and Wired, and has been the recipient of awards from PDN, Critical Mass and Center. His first indoor, kinetic installation, entitled “Chaotic Equilibrium,” is currently on view at the Brooks Museum in Memphis, Tennessee.

Shana Lopes

Shana Lopes is a highly experienced art historian and curator based at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, SFMoMA.

Following roles in commercial photography studios, as well as at both the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, she has in her current role organized exhibitions such as Constellations: Photographs in Dialogue, Sightlines: Photographs from the Collection, A Living for Us All: Artists and the WPA, Sea Change, Zanele Muholi: Eye Me, and the upcoming SECA 2024 Art Award.

She holds a PhD in History of Photography, and has a particular passion for work that explores identity, under-represented communities, climate change, as well as photographic work that uses alternative processes and blurs the boundaries between media.

Karolin Klüppel

Karolin Klüppel is an in-demand photographer and Women Photograph member whose sensitive and striking work regularly returns to themes of gender, family and motherhood.

She first rose to prominence in 2013 with the series and subsequent monograph Kingdom of Girls – a project that blended documentation and composition to explore the indigenous people of Meghalaya in India who live in a unique matriarchal structure. Since then she has turned her lens onto herself and fellow mothers, exploring the profound experience of motherhood in her series No Room of One’s Own.

She has held solo exhibitions in the US, Switzerland, France, Colombia and her home country of Germany, and has produced editorial works for esteemed publications such as National Geographic, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post and Spiegel.

Amy Toensing

Amy Toensing is an American photojournalist, National Geographic Explorer and FUJIFILM Creator whose work tells intimate stories of the lives of ordinary people around the world.

As a regular contributor to National Geographic magazine for over two decades, she has captured fascinating stories on topics such as cave-dwelling tribes in Papa New Guinea, land rights for women in India and Uganda, treasure hunting in Namibia, food insecurity in the United States, and droughts in New South Wales – with an image from the latter chosen by National Geographic as one of its 50 best photos of all time.

Her work has been exhibited throughout the world and recognized with numerous awards, including two solo exhibits at Visa Pour L’image, Festival of the Photograph in France, and she dedicates much of her time to teaching photography to people in underserved communities, including Burmese refugees in Baltimore, young photojournalist in Islamabad, Pakistan and Syrian refugee children in Jordan.

Angela Connor

Angela Connor is Senior Curator at the Museum of Australian Photography in Melbourne, where she delivers an ambitious exhibition programme and selects from an extensive archived collection focused on Australian image making.

She has a Master of Fine Arts, and has worked in the industry for the last fifteen years, as both gallery manager of a contemporary art gallery and as a studio manager for renowned painter and sculptor Robert Owen, before curating shows for some of Australia’s most celebrated photographers at MAPh. From 2019-2022, she has been on the board of the Kyneton Contemporary Art Triennial, commissioning artists to make context sensitive work that explores place and community. This rich experience and her passion for the art world give her a valuable perspective for photographers both experienced and emerging.

Charlie Hamilton James

Charlie Hamilton James is a celebrated photojournalist, known for documenting wildlife conservation issues in innovative and unexpected ways.

His career began at 16, working on David Attenborough’s ‘Trails of Life’ series for the BBC before becoming a wildlife cameraman on series such as Planet Earth and The Natural World, and later branching into still photography. He has spent a career capturing “the brilliance of nature”, and this mission statement has taken him to far-flung places such as North America, East Africa and the Amazon, documenting topics ranging from bird cognition, to rats on the streets of New York, to the daily lives of indigenous South American tribes.

He was a 2016 National Geographic ‘Innovation in Photography’ Fellow, has presented on numerous occasions for the BBC, is a BAFTA and Emmy nominee, and has won Wildlife Photojournalist of the Year and National Geographic Photographer’s Photographer award 2022. His latest series ‘End Times’ feels like a culmination of this experience – a more direct alarm bell for the state of our natural world in which he stages provocative scenes infused with a dark humor, prompting questions about how unrestrained industrialization and consumerism is impacting our environment and animal neighbors in frightening and wide-ranging ways.