Judges’ Biographies
Best Photography Book Award
Philippe Garner is a Director of Christie’s and the firm’s International Head of Photographs and 20th Century Decorative Art & Design. He has been professionally involved with photographs since co-ordinating the 1971 auction that marked the launch of this subject in the international art market. In the intervening decades he has brought to auction a great diversity of material including major collections such as those of Marie Thérèse and André Jammes, Paul Walter, Gert Elfering and Leon Constantiner. Philippe is well known as a passionate advocate of the medium and has published widely on various aspects of photography that particularly interest him. He has curated exhibitions in London, Paris and Tokyo.
Charlotte Cotton is the creative director of the forthcoming London galleries of the National Media Museum, UK. Previously, she was the curator and head of the Wallis Annenberg Department of Photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, head of programming at The Photographers’ Gallery, London and curator of photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She has been a visiting professor and critic at Yale University, New Haven; SVA, New York; Parsons School of Art and Design, New York; Art Institute, Chicago; UCLA, UCIrvine, UCRiverside and USC in California. She is the author of The Photograph as Contemporary Art, the founding editor of Wordwithoutpictures.org, and has commissioned books including The Sun as Error by Shannon Ebner and the forthcoming Machine Project’s Field Guide to LACMA.
Tessa Traeger is widely acknowledged as having raised the subject of photographic, food still-life to the status of art. Trained at Guildford School of Photography and Fine Art, Traeger has worked and at times lived at Rossetti Studios in Chelsea, London since the 1960’s. Throughout her career she has sought to balance the demands and developments of both commissioned and experimental work. As an artist, Traeger is especially known for her still-life photographs taken on large format cameras, many of which were published during her long association with British Vogue. She has exhibited regularly since 1978 in Paris, London and New York as well many group shows. Her work is represented in the National Portrait Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Bibliotheque National in Paris, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Citibank collection in London.
Best Moving Image Book Award
Francine Stock is a broadcaster, critic and writer. Since 2004 she has presented BBC Radio 4’s The Film Programme. For BBC television she has fronted a range of arts and current affairs programmes including Newsnight. Writing includes two novels, a cinema column and a forthcoming book on film for Chatto and Windus. She is an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, vice-president of the Hay Festival and founder patron of the new Hay-on-Wye Festival of British Cinema. She has appeared, briefly, in one feature film, Louis Malle’s Damage (1992).
Mark Cousins is a documentary filmmaker, writer and curator. In the 1990s, he became director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival and has since been guest curator at film festivals around the world. He has presented BBC2’s Moviedrome, co-edited Imagining Reality, The Faber Book of Documentary, and directed and presented BBC2’s Scene by Scene. Together with Antonia Bird, Robert Carlyle and Irvine Welsh, Cousins is a director of the production company 4Way Pictures. Since 2001 he has written for Prospect and his acclaimed book, The Story of Film, was published in 2004 and is now being filmed. He has just spent 3 weeks in Iraq filming a feature documentary, The First Movie, is writing a travel and cinema book called Rupture and co-writing a TV play, Scotston. Cousins was awarded the Salzgeber prize at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival.
Professor John Orr is Professor Emeritus at Edinburgh University where he teaches graduate film studies. He is a progamming consultant at Edinburgh Filmhouse and co-editor of the Edinburgh Series in Critical Film Studies published by Edinburgh University Press. He has published widely in the fields of Cinema, Theatre and Contemporary Culture as both author and editor. Among his books are Cinema and Modernity, The Art and Politics of Film, and Hitchcock and 20th Century Cinema. His most recent book, Romantics and Modernists in British Cinema, will be published by Edinburgh University Press in Spring, 2010. He now lives in East Lothian.