Jury 2018

Finalists and Laureate are nominated by an internationally sourced panel of photography professionals & experts.

IWPA President/photographer, France.

Founder of the International Women Photography Association, award winning french photographer (Ilford 1989 & Defi Jeune 1997) Severine Blanchet is based in Toulouse, France. President of the IWPA since 2001, she promotes women photographers worldwide through the IWPA award and international exhibitions. Her solo and group exhibitions include, Artroom, Collective loft and Villa 21 in Dubai, The Stonor Center in Kuala Lumpur, and Capitol in Toulouse.

The developing process is an integral part of her creative practice - controlling the editing and manipulation of the original image allows her to play with a wide spectrum of transformations at the different stages of developing the film. Thus being the editor gives her more power after the ‘click’, revealing her strength and sensitivity at that stage

Photographer, Spain.

Cristina De Middel is a photographer whose work investigates photography’s ambiguous relationship to truth. Blending documentary and conceptual photographic practices, she plays with reconstructions and archetypes in order to build a more layered understanding of the subject she approaches.

After a 10 year career as a photojournalist, Cristina stepped outside of the straight documentary gaze and produced the acclaimed series “The Afronauts” (2012), which explored the history of a failed space program in Zambia in the 1960s. De Middel continuously produces new bodies of work. The series This is what hatred did (2014), Sharkification (2015) and Jan Mayen (2015), to name a few examples were all published as books in 2015. In 2015 de Middel launched her own book-publishing house; This Book is True.

De Middel’s work has received numerous awards in both the editorial and the artistic field, including PhotoFolio Arles 2012, the Deutsche Börse Prize, POPCAP’ 13, and the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography in New York.

Director of Alliance Française Dubai. France

Bernard Frontero - Director Alliance Française Dubai UAE - After a few years at UNESCO where he was in charge of scientific missions, Bernard Frontero has been working in cultural diplomacy, as a director of Alliance Française for 25 years, in different countries – Canada, Pakistan, Mexico…- where, in connection with the French Embassy, he strengthened the cultural ties between French and foreign artists and artistic structures.

In 2010, with the local Spanish authorities, he developed the first “Centre Pompidou” outside France, an event that transformed the city of Malaga into the cultural capital of Andalucia. Since 2014, he is in charge of renovating the image and programs of the unique French cultural Centre in Dubai. Bernard Frontero is also passionate about photography, with a focus on African photographers.

Photographer/filmmaker, UAE.

Lamya Gargash was born in 1982 in Dubai, U.A.E. She earned a B.S. in visual communication from the American University of Sharjah, U.A.E., in 2004 and a M.A. in communication design from Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design, University of Arts London, in 2007. She lives and works in Dubai.

Concerned with the relics of an ever self-renewing architecture, Gargash documents the forgotten spaces in public and private realms in Emirati society. Throughout her career, she has won a number of awards for her work in film and photography. At the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009), her series Familial, was featured in the U.A.E.¹s first Venice Biennale exhibition, It¹s Not You, It¹s Me. In 2004 she received first prize in the Emirates Film Competition.

Gargash¹s work has been included in several group exhibitions and film festivals, including View From Inside, Contemporary Arab photography, Video and Mixed Media Art, FotoFest 2014 Biennial Houston, Texas, USA; I Exist (in Some Way) (2013), The Bluecoat, Liverpool, UK, the Liverpool Arabic Arts Festival and Belgian Nomadic Arts Centre, Moussem International Photography Festival.

Writer & Editor, United Kingdom.

Charlotte Jansen is a British/Sri Lankan writer and editor born in London, UK. She received an MA (Oxon) in Modern Languages from Oxford University in 2008 in Modern Languages. In 2010 she founded a non-profit artist organisation, NO WAY, working with international artists and curating exhibitions in London, Lisbon, Tel Aviv and New York.

In 2012, Charlotte joined ArtSlant as a Senior Editor. In 2014, she became Editor-at-Large at Elephant magazine. She has also written on contemporary art, social issues and culture for many publications including the Guardian, The Financial Times, ELLE, Vice, Artsy, Wallpaper and AnOther magazine.

In April 2017 Charlotte published her first book, Girl on Girl: Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze, (Laurence King, UK

Founder at Photosymposium Asia, Malaysia.

Steven V-L Lee is a Malaysian freelance photographer based in London. He began his photographic career as a documentary and travel photographer in the late 90's when he began writing travel related articles for magazines and journals. In 2000, he published his book Outside Looking In : Kuala Lumpur, which received the Asian Prize at PhotoCity Sagamihara Festival of the Image, Japan in 2007, the collection is held with the City of Sagamihara National Photographic Archives.

In 2009, Steven initiated the KUALA LUMPUR INTERNATIONAL PHOTOAWARDS, an annual international portrait photography competition centred in Malaysia, focussing on the best in contemporary portrait photography and has attracted the participation of some top international photographers. Steven believes in the importance of photography education and runs workshops through the EXPOSURE+ Photo Mentoring platform in Kuala Lumpur with other photographers, and has been a portfolio reviewer at the Mt. Rokko International Photography Festival in Kobe, Japan from 2013 to 2017.

In 2017, he founded PHOTOSYMPOSIUM Asia, and hosted the first symposium on Photography Education and Opportunities in Kuala Lumpur.

Photographer/Artist/Curator, India.

Anay Mann began his photography career in 2001, with his documentary project ‘Generation in Transition’. It was an exploration of urban Indian youth, grappling with exciting change, unleashed by a neo-liberalized economy. He worked on a conceptual public art project, ‘Equal Dreams’, where he looks at the fundamental right to equality. He used an ordinary chair, as a metaphor for power and photographed people across all strata of society, in various regions of India. His many years of documentation of his wife, showing vignettes of their domestic life together, resulted in project ‘About Neetika’.

Since 2008, he has been working with auto-portraits, using his own body as the site of investigation & staging tableaux’s where performance becomes an integral part of the visual narrative. His work on auto-portraits blurs the distinction between art & life and illusion vs reality.

His work has been shown in various solo & group shows in India, France, Brazil, Poland, Finland, United Kingdom, Spain, Germany & Netherlands.

Anay Mann alternates between working as a photojournalist and an artist. He’s an adjunct faculty at ‘National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad’ and at ‘Pearl Academy of Art & Fashion, Noida’.

Curator, Japan.

Naoko Ohta is a Japanese gallerist, curator, editor and senior lecturer. She founded the Tokyo-based company Klee Inc. Paris Tokyo in 1987 and has organized over 100 art exhibitions mainly in photography, both in Japan and abroad. Besides the curation of the Taisho University Art Gallery, “ESPACE KUU” and the Gallery 916, one of her recent works has been the production of the 20th century artist Rosanjin in Paris, Kyoto, Shimane and Tokyo. In 2011, Naoko Ohta initiated the NPO « Tokyo-Ga - describing Tokyo scapes by 100 photographers » of which she is the chairman and chief curator in order to document Tokyo in the aftermath of the triple catastrophe of March 2011. The artworks of the Tokyo-Ga project have been shown in New York, Kuala Lumpur and mostly recently, Miami Airport. In order to promote mutual understanding and tolerance, Naoko Ohta has started to focus on cross cultural projects such as the « Two Mountain Photography Project » between Malaysia and Japan. She has initiated several other art projects such as « Ecobeing », a Japanese website for the environment.
In 1999 - 2001, Naoko Ohta was the Japanese representative at Les Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d’Arles.

Photo Editor, Europe / Africa

Jeanne Mercier is a critic and photo editor since 2005 based between Europe and Africa.

She is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Afrique in visu platform (2006). www.afriqueinvisu.org, which promotes new practices and forms of dissemination of photography in North and West Africa. Today she divides her time between Afrique in visu and consulting activities for cultural programming in the field of contemporary photographic practices and the issues of professional photographers in Africa. She is currently working on several festivals and exhibitions in Europe and Africa and writes for various photographic journals (The Eye of Photography, Diptyk, Fisheye Lens Culture).
She is a nominator of the Pictet Prize, Kyoto Prize, First Book Award, A New Gaze - Vontobel prize for contemporary photography and Jury member of the Prix Cap Prize for Contemporary African Photography.

Jury 2018

Finalists and Laureate are nominated by an internationally sourced panel of photography professionals & experts.

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