Judges 2024

Emma Bowkett is Director of Photography at the FT Weekend Magazine and a curator focussed on lens-based arts and contemporary visual culture. She is Associate Lecturer at UAL: University of the Arts London, and regularly participates at international workshops, portfolio reviews, festivals and awards. Emma is a visiting speaker for various photography programmes across the UK and abroad.

Emma is the curator of a Financial Times special supplement and talks programme at the annual Photo London photography fair and is on the advisory board for Peckham 24, the annual festival that celebrates established and early career artists working with an expanded photographic practice. Emma is based in London, UK.

Photo credit: Maja Daniels

Kalpesh Lathigra, born in London, England in 1971 and studied photography at the London College of Printing. After leaving the course in 1994, he was awarded The Independent Newspaper Photographer Traineeship. Kalpesh worked for The Independent as a staff photographer for one year before freelancing for the national newspapers in the UK for 6 years covering news and features. In 2000 , he gave up working for newspapers and made the decision to work on long term projects and magazine and commercial assignments. In the same year he was awarded a 1st Arts prize in the World Press Photo. In 2003, he embarked on a project documenting the lives of Widows in India, receiving The W.Eugene Smith Fellowship and Churchill Fellowship. His first book “ Lost in the Wilderness” , a body of photographs on the Oglala Sioux and Pine Ridge Reservation was published in 2015. Noted by Sean O Hagan – The Guardian critic as one of the photo books of the year. In 2022, He published Memoire Temporelle, the first of a trilogy series exploring his South Asian heritage.

Gem Fletcher is a hybrid creative focusing on visual culture at the intersection of life and art. Through explorations in film, photography, sound and language, she creates stories that provoke emotion and challenge perspectives. In addition to her personal research practice, she works across a range of contexts including editorial, commercial and fine art. In 2019, Gem launched The Messy Truth podcast, a series of candid conversations that unpack the future of visual culture and what it means to be a photographer today.
Gem is a freelance writer specialising in photography, art and the creative process and how they manifest in contemporary culture. She is a Photo Director of Riposte Magazine, contributing editor of Creative Review and The September Issues and writes for publications and platforms including: It’s Nice That, BJP, The Guardian, Riposte, Sleek, AnOther, Elephant and Ladybeard. She has also written essays for a variety of photo books including Flower Men by Ken Hermann and Silence by Flora Hanitijo.

D. Wiafe’s work champions the power and contributions of youth-led thinking to collaborative projects. He has an extensive background in developing project partnerships with brands and arts organisation that enable creative talent to contribute innovate ideas to the development of branded content, community initiatives, social enterprises and more.

Over the last year, D has written an innovative new BA course in Photography, which he now is the course leader of at the London College of Communication (UAL). There, he has pushed the possibilities of online learning by introducing ‘New Waves’; a series of livestreamed talks and workshops with key figures in photography, produced by students. To date the series has featured Ronan McKensie, Lola & Pani, Theo Cottle, Luke&Nik and has produced live talks content for The Photographer’s Gallery, Capture One and Peckham 24. Alongside Adrian Wood, he is also co-founded Content Lab, a hub designed to give creatives at LCC their first steps into the industry. Each project at the lab is a collaboration that gives students opportunities to respond to live campaign briefs from renowned brands and in the last few years, the project has partnered with @converselondon and @insidejigsaw and continues to bring on board collaborators who align with the young creates can give the shape of their visual identity.

As an artist, his work has taken him from creating staged tableaux with grime’s early pioneers, to acting as lead photographic mentor on the award-winning youth platform ‘The Cut’. Combined, his projects have allowed young people to collaborate on commissions with Nike, Puma, Adidas as well as exhibit with The Royal Photographic Society, Photofusion and The Southbank Centre. He has worked with UAL Insights and Autograph ABP as project lead and curator on Album, a youth-led project twice exhibited at Rivington Place and featured inThe Guardian and BBC News Online. He was one of Photofusion’s artists in residence 2016-18, creating “4PM in the Endz”, a multi-media exploration of the stigma of gang affiliation in Pollards Hill, South London. The work was exhibited at Photofusion (2018), StreetLevel Photoworks, and Peckham 24 (2019).

D continues his work in mentoring as Photofusion’s Youth Programme Manager. He developed and runs the Creator Studio and the Young Curators programme which is behind the BLK BXY JOY Exhibition (2022).

Alastair McKimm is Editor-in-Chief of i-D. Prior to his appointment at i-D, he contributed regularly to T, The New York Times Magazine, British Vogue, Vogue Italia and Self Service. McKimm’s bold and modern aesthetic allows him to reconstruct fashion in any context. Born and raised in Northern Ireland, McKimm began his styling career in London after studying fashion design at Nottingham Art School.McKimm’s talent for creating clean, precise looks has garnered the attention of designers such as Saint Laurent, Anthony Vaccarello, Calvin Klein, Jil Sander, The Row, Alexander Wang, and Versus Versace, who request him for their campaigns, consultations and fashion shows. Additionally, his editorial collaborations are with noted photographers such as Craig McDean, David Sims, Mario Sorrenti, Willy Vanderperre, Inez & Vinoodh, Mikael Jansson, Dan Jackson, Amy Troost and Paolo Roversi.

Dana Lixenberg is known for her stripped-down portraits that revel in the elemental characteristics of her subjects. She uses a large-format field camera – a cumbersome tool, which necessitates what the artist refers to as a ‘slow dance’ between her and her subjects. The resulting portraits contain an enormous amount of detail and texture, and are as revelatory as a personal encounter. The power of the work arises from its intimacy, compositional rigor and, importantly, the absence of social stereotyping. Besides her extensive editorial practice she pursues long-term projects with a primary focus on marginalised communities. Lixenberg’s most extensive body of work to date is Imperial Courts, 1993-2015 (2015), which she begun in the aftermath of the 1992 Rodney King riots. Spanning 22 years, the project tracks the changing shape of an underserved community in Watts, Los Angeles. In contrast to the often one dimensional, sensationalised media coverage of this neighborhood, Lixenberg employs a more subdued and collaborative photographic approach. Like her other projects, Imperial
Courts consists of a series of photographs and a publication. Dana Lixenberg lives and works in Amsterdam (NL) and New York, NY (US).

Alexandra Stroemich is the Creative Lead of Brand & Creative at Capture One. With a BA in Photography and MA in Visual Culture and Identity from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts Copenhagen, she has worked as Art Director and cross-disciplinary artist on projects with visual artists such as David Lynch and Daniel Arsham and commercial brands like Balenciaga and Saint Laurent. She was co-curator at Nordic Contemporary, a Paris-based gallery representing emerging and established Scandinavian artists internationally. She has tutored as a critic and external censor at the Royal Danish Academy Copenhagen for MA graduates focusing on art direction and visual storytelling.

Photo credit: Gabija Morkunaite

Jono Tusder is a senior Photography Agent at London based artist management agency, CANVAS Represents. Prior to this, Jono was a freelance producer and co-owner of a photographic studio in Shoreditch. He has been in the creative industries for 9 years and has worked with clients including; Adidas, Alexander McQueen, British Vogue, Calvin Klein, Dazed, Hermès, Luncheon Magazine, M Le Monde, Sandro, Stella McCartney and Wall Street Journal.

Lola Paprocka is a photographer with a practice centring on documentary imagery. Her focus is on creating work with sentimental narratives that are authentic and honest in their representation of the subject whilst retaining her personal clean and unfussy aesthetic. Lola has curated the Independent Photography Festival in London, in addition to a number of solo exhibitions and book launches. She founded and curated Palm* Studios, photo book publisher that showcases photographers and artists through creative projects, online features, exhibitions, events and book launches. It was founded in 2015. Alongside her personal practice, she also shoot as part of a photography duo with Pani Paul under the moniker Lola & Pani. This work as well as parts of her personal practice overlap into the fashion industry where they have contributed stories to magazines including The New York Times, British Vogue and i-D Magazine.