Sony World Photography Awards 2010 Judges announced

The Honorary Jury for the main annual competition comprises 12 specially selected World Photography Organisation Academy members.  For the professional awards selection, these 12 members will initially judge within their respective photographic genres of expertise. Later they will come together as one collective group to select the overall winners in both the amateur and professional programmes, and the overall winner, the I’Iris D’Or.

The official pre-selection committee of the amateur competition is iStockphoto, the internet’s original member-generated image and design community. iStockphoto is the world’s busiest online image market which has helped thousands of amateur photographers increase their skills and go on to sell their work professionally.

A jury for the Student Focus Programme is also selected from the Academy members.

The 2010 WPA Honorary Jury

Judging the Commercial categories are:  Chair, Mark Sealy (UK), Director of Autograph (The Association of Black Photographers); Nadav Kander (UK), photographer;   Scott Thode (US), Deputy Picture Editor of Fortune Magazine and Chloe Limpkin (UK), Picture Director of Harper’s Bazaar.

 Judging the Photojournalism and Documentary categories are:  Chair, Aidan Sullivan (UK), Vice President Getty Images; Pablo Bartholomew (India), photographer and educator; Roberto Koch (Italy), Publisher, Contrasto and Founder of FORMA (the international Centre of Photography in Milan) and Monica Allende (UK), Picture Editor of the Sunday Times Magazine.

Judging the Fine Art categories are:  Chair, Bill Hunt (US), Co-founder of Hasted Hunt Gallery in New York; Trisha Ziff (Mexico), curator, scholar, film-maker; Michelle Dunn Marsh (USA), Co-publisher of Aperture Magazine and Editor-at-large at Chronicle Books and Bohnchang Koo (Korea), photographer.

Student Focus Programme

The judges for the Student Focus, a competition which involves over 120 photographic institutions around the world, are: Adrian Evans (UK), Director of Panos pictures agency; Adrian Boot (UK), music photographer and co-founder of www.urbanimage.tv; Jonathon Torgovnik (US), widely exhibited documentary photographer and co-founder of NGO, Foundation Rwanda; Idris Khan (UK), artist and Sue Steward (UK), photography critic, writer, radio broadcaster, photo-editor and journalist.

Astrid Merget, Creative Director of the Sony World Photography Awards, comments: ‘It is a great honour to announce the judges of the 2010 Awards. We are privileged to have such an extraordinarily influential jury – from photographers to photo editors, gallery owners and film-makers.  The quality of submissions this year has been impressively high, and we look forward to working closely with the jury to discover the winners for the 2010 awards”.

Key dates for the Sony World Photography Awards 2010

2010

4 January                   Closing date for professional and amateur categories

12 January                 Lifetime Achievement Award announcement

19-29 January           Global Tour exhibition, Art Work Space, London

23 February               Shortlist announcement

23 March                   Category winners’ announcement

Cannes, France

19 – 25 April               World Photography Festival  

21 – 23 April               The Photographers’ Programme

22 April                       Sony World Photography Awards ceremony