Entries closing soon for the $50,000 Moran Contemporary Photographic Prize
Entries for one of Australia’s richest photography competitions, the Moran Contemporary Photographic Prize (MCPP), close on 6 March. The total prize money for the MCPP is $100,000, with $50,000 awarded to the winning photograph, which should portray life in Australia; "places, people and lifestyle that make our lovable country quintessentially Australian". Finalists receive $1,000 in prize money.
Organisers of the competition, the Moran Arts Foundation, have recently named the judges for 2019. They include Cheryl Newman – a respected international photographer and curator, Jon Jones – a celebrated international photojournalist and photo editor, and artist and filmmaker, Stephen Dupont.
Dupont said that he was humbled and excited to be selected as a judge for the competition. “The process of viewing and then selecting finalists work is always an inspirational and moving experience for me personally. Seeing the unique visions of so many photographers opens our minds to the poetic moments and telling stories of these Australian times.”
“I am delighted to be returning to Sydney to judge the 2019 Moran Contemporary Photography Prize,” Newman said.“In previous years the competition has beautifully articulated Australian daily life allowing me as an outsider to witness its richness and complexity. Last year it was exciting to name the 22-year-old artist James Bugg as winner of this respected award. I cannot wait to be immersed in this year’s entries."
About the judges
Cheryl Newman
Cheryl Newman is an artist and independent curator of photography living in London. Her personal practice examines identity, fiction and the fallibility of memory. For more than fifteen years she was the Photography Director of the award-winning Telegraph Magazine where she raised the profile of the magazine and commissioned intelligent and inventive photography worldwide. She is a nominator for the Deutsche Borse Photography Prize Foundation and has served on juries globally including, National Portrait Gallery’s Taylor Wessing Portrait prize, The Bar Tur Photobook award, ESTAÇÃO IMAGEM PRIZE, photojournalism prize, Portugal, and the Santa Fe Editors Choice. Cheryl is also the chair of the RPS Photography Awards.
For the past three years she has been working with the Gaia Foundation to commission and curate We Feed the World, a photographic global adventure documenting the lives of family and peasant farmers for an exhibition which premiered at the Barge house Gallery, London, in Autumn 2018. Most recently she curated 209 Women, one of the highest profile exhibitions in 2018 in which all the female MP’s in the UK Parliament were photographed by women photographers which opened in parliament on December the 14th 2018 to celebrate 100 years of suffrage and which moves to Open Eye Gallery Liverpool Feb 2019, Photo North Nov 2019 and will end the year as a permanent feature in the Parliamentary Art collection. A recent MA graduate, she is a visiting lecturer at the Bilder Nordic School in Oslo and lectures at universities in the UK.
Jon Jones
Jon Jones is an independent photo editor, curator, and consultant and is the co-founder of the photographic consulting agency Newman-Jones. As a photojournalist for the Sygma Photo Agency in Paris, Jon documented conflict all over the world, most notably in Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East, his work being widely published by Time, Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine, the Sunday Times Magazine, Paris Match, and Stern.
His numerous international photographic awards include two World Press Photo Awards, Photographer of the Year, News Photographer of the Year, Feature Photographer of the Year, and Photo Essay of the Year.
He has collaborated on numerous books and media projects and his work has been widely exhibited as well as being held by private collectors and museums. He has worked as a video producer for the BBC, producing magazine features, documentaries and news programmes on a worldwide basis. He was part of the team that won a Royal Television Society Award for the coverage of the Kosovo crisis.
Jones was the curator of the Sunday Times Magazine 50th Anniversary exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery, London which toured nationally, and is also the editor and producer of a major retrospective photographic book documenting the Bosnian War which received a POYi judges special recognition award.
He is a regular photographic judge, having served on the jury for the Getty Grants, the Association of Photographers Award, HIPA Dubai, the Sony WPO Award, the Moran Photographic Award. He is a board member and judge of the Ian Parry Scholarship, the Chair of the Jury for the Canon Professional Editors Award and an International Jury member for the Visa D’Or Awards in France.
Jones regularly lectures and has taught the Joop Swart Master-class for the World Press, and the Visa D’Or workshops in France. He was previously the Director of Photography for the Sunday Times Magazine where his work was the recipient of the Amnesty International Photojournalism Award, the POYi Award of Excellence for visual editing, Photojournalist of the Year and Magazine Picture Editor of the Year.
Stephen Dupont
Stephen Dupont has produced a remarkable body of visual work; hauntingly beautiful photographs of fragile cultures and marginalized peoples. He skillfully captures the human dignity of his subjects with great intimacy and often in some of the world’s most dangerous regions. His images have received international acclaim for their artistic integrity and valuable insight into the people, culture and communities that have existed for hundreds of years, yet are fast disappearing from our world.
Dupont’s work has earned him photography’s most prestigious prizes, including a 2005 Robert Capa Gold Medal citation and the 2015 Olivier Rebbot Award from the Overseas Press Club of America; a Bayeux War Correspondent’s Prize; and first places in the World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year International, the Australian Walkleys, and Leica/CCP Documentary Award. In 2007 he was the recipient of the W. Eugene Smith Grant for Humanistic Photography for his ongoing project on Afghanistan. In 2010 he received the Gardner Fellowship at Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology.
Dupont has twice been an official war artist for the Australian War Memorial for his photography and his work has also been featured in The New Yorker, Aperture, Newsweek, Time, Matador, Polka Magazine, GQ, Esquire, French and German GEO, Le Figaro, Liberation, The Smithsonian, The Sunday Times Magazine, The Independent, The Guardian, The New York Times Magazine, Stern, The Australian Financial Review Magazine, Interview and Vanity Fair.
Dupont has held major exhibitions in London, Paris, New York, Sydney, Canberra, Tokyo, and Shanghai, and at Perpignan’s Visa Pour L’Image, China’s Ping Yao and Holland’s Noorderlicht festivals.
The winner will be announced on Tuesday, 7 May at Juniper Hall in Paddington. The Moran Contemporary Photographic Prize Exhibition opens on 4 May and runs until 2 June 2019 as part of the Head On Photo Festival Sydney.
Entries can be submitted online at www.moranprizes.com.au
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