Meet the 2022 Head On Photo Award Judges

Azu Nwagbogu is the Founder and Director of the African Artists’ Foundation (AAF), a non-profit organisation based in Lagos, Nigeria. Nwagbogu was elected as the Interim Director/Head Curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art in South Africa from 2018 to 2019. He also serves as Founder and Director of LagosPhoto Festival. He is the creator of Art Base Africa, a virtual space to learn about contemporary African Art. Additionally, Director and Editor-in-Chief of Art Base Africa, an online journal that focuses on contemporary art from Africa and the Diaspora. Nwagbogu served as a juror for the Dutch Doc, POPCAP Photography Awards, the World Press Photo, Prisma Photography Award (2015), Greenpeace Photo Award (2016), New York Times Portfolio Review (2017-2018), W. Eugene Smith Award (2018), Photo Espana (2018), Foam Paul Huf Award (2019), Wellcome photography prize (2019). For the past 20 years, he has curated private collections for various prominent individuals and corporate organisations in Africa.

As the Picture Editor for Guardian Australia, Carly Earl works with the best photojournalists in the country. She is also an award-winning photojournalist who has been working in the media for over a decade. Carly’s photography has accompanied some of the Guardian’s biggest stories. She covers Indigenous affairs, healthcare, women’s rights and the environment. Her passion is connecting an audience to the voiceless people of real news stories.

Eefje Ludwig (b. 1982) is an independent Dutch photography curator, mentor and advisor currently based in The Netherlands. From 2008 to 2016, Eefje was the education department manager at World Press Photo developing different training projects, publications, and exhibitions. For many years she led the Joop Swart Masterclass. She collaborated with PHmuseum as the Education Manager in 2016, was Artistic Director of Festival Photoreporter en Baie de Saint-Brieuc in 2017, and is a founding member of the Transformations project and the international photographers’ collective/agency MAPS. More recently, she curated the retrospective show and accompanying catalogue of Chas Gerretsen in collaboration with the Nederlands Fotomuseum (2021). Eefje is currently working as a guest curator for Noorderlicht Festival 2023. In 2019 she founded The Forest Bathing Circle aiming to reconnect people to nature through artistic expressions. She mentors photographers worldwide, seeking to support them in their careers.

Eric Mencher has been photographing professionally for over 40 years and is currently concentrating on street photography and long-term documentary projects. As a photojournalist at The Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper until 2009, he covered a variety of assignments, including the post-apartheid era in South Africa, the aftermath of genocide in Rwanda, and the civil war in Chechnya. He also photographed numerous stories in the arts, like the 100th anniversary of James Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses. Mencher received the Overseas Press Club Award for Rwanda: Aftermath of Genocide and has won other major awards, including prizes in World Press Photo and Pictures of the Year. He collaborates on projects with his wife, Kass Mencher, including a series of diptychs titled Duets. He is an original member of the Instagram-based collective Hikari Creative.

Giles Clarke is a photojournalist who focuses on humanitarian awareness in communities ravaged by poverty and conflict throughout the world. His longterm projects for the United Nations (OCHA) have concentrated on the war in Yemen and the growing unrest in the Sahel region of Africa. He is syndicated globally by Getty Images (Reportage) and the latest recipient of the ‘WARS Photography Award’ in December 2021.

Julia Coddington is an Australian based street and documentary photographer, teacher and community builder. She is a strong advocate for the female voice in street photography as co-founder of the Unexposed Collective and an administrator of @womeninstreet, a large international community of women street photographers. She is also a member of the Little Box Collective, an international collective of street photographers. Julia’s work has been exhibited in Australia and internationally, she has curated exhibitions and group shows, has considerable experience as a judge for photographic awards and was a nominee for the Leica Oskar Barnack prize in 2020.
 

Kaya lee Berne is a photo editor at National Geographic magazine, where she specializes in natural history and wildlife photography. Prior to this role, she was a lead producer for LOOK3, Festival of the Photograph. Kaya earned a degree in neuroscience from the University of Virginia and currently resides in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Meg Hewitt is from Sydney, Australia and formally studied sculpture, painting and temporal media before taking up photography in 2010. She has exhibited both in Australia and internationally and her book ‘Tokyo is Yours’ is held in important collections such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the International Centre for Photography in New York. Meg also teaches workshops in street photography, street portraiture and editing for narrative. She has judged competitions such as Aussie Street and the Miami Street Photography Festival Award. Meg is a member of the Australian photo collective Oculi and the international street photography collective UP.
 

Moshe Rosenzveig OAM is the founder and Creative Director of Head On Photo Festival. Moshe has over 40 years’ experience in the media as a photojournalist, award-winning television producer/director (SBS TV) and commercial photographer. He has held lecturing positions at the University of Technology (UTS), the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS) and others. He has also sat on judging panels for various competitions including The Walkleys, Tokyo Photography Prize, Sydney’s Art & About and is the lead judge for Head On Photo Awards. In 2018, Moshe received an Order of Australia Medal for services to the arts.

Nelson Ramírez de Arellano was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1969 and currently lives and works in Havana, Cuba. He is an artist, curator, and Director of the Fototeca de Cuba (National Museum and Gallery of Photography). Ramírez de Arellano was also chief curator of Fototeca de Cuba from 2001 to 2010. As curator won the National Curatorial Award in 2006 for the exhibition The City and Photography: Havana 1900-2005 organized for the IX Havana Biennial. He is the founder and organizer of the Havana Month of Photography (Noviembre Fotográfico) and an internationally recognized contemporary artist who, as a member of the artistic team “Liudmila & Nelson,” represented Cuba at the 53rd Venice Biennial.

Franklin studied painting and drawing at Oxford and Whitechapel and photography at West Surrey College of Art and Design. He received a doctorate in Geography from the University of Oxford and was awarded a professorship in documentary photography.  

He covered the civil war in Lebanon, unemployment in Britain, famine in Sudan and the Heysel Stadium disaster while working for Agence Presse Sygma. As a full member of Magnum since 1989, he photographed the uprising in Tiananmen Square, shot the ‘Tank Man’, and documented the uprising in Beijing, earning him a World Press Photo Award.  

He has long collaborated with National Geographic and has published several books on his own, including Footprint: Our Landscape in Flux and The Documentary Impulse. 

Franklin was chair of the World Press Photo jury (2017). Franklin won the Medical Journalists’ Association Feature of the Year award (2021) for his story on Covid in a London hospital.