Launch of the Emerge Awards

I am excited to be one of the jurors for the Emerge Awards, a UK-wide, open competition that champions emerging talent and diversity in the creative industries.

Guy Armitage, the CEO of Zealous, a London-based digital submissions platform for the creative community, set up the awards in response to the changing nature of Britain's relationship with Europe.

Their aim is to promote, nurture and safeguard the interests of all talent in the creative industries. Organisations within the sector will then serve as a pressure group, supporting lobby groups such as the Creative Industries Federation.

Says Armitage: ‘The UK's creative economy currently employs one out of 11 people, contributing £160,000 a minute to its GDP, a figure that has grown year on year for the last decade. It is a key pillar to our country's future economic prosperity, and it is vital that it flourishes beyond Brexit.'

Armitage adds: ‘Our hope is that Emerge will help this happen. In addition to holding annual awards to celebrate talent, we want to provide the UK's creative industries with a strong, unified voice in an economic climate that's rapidly changing. Ultimately Emerge is seeking to remind our decision makers (and the world) that the UK's creative talent is best in class, worth supporting and open for business.'

The awards are in 12 categories – Architecture, Art, Craft, Writing, Design, Digital Art, Fashion, Film, Gaming, Music, Performance, Photography – with each carrying a £1,000 cash prize.

The judges, who have been selected to judge in their specific fields, include Brett Rogers, OBE, the director of The Photographers' Gallery, Chi-chi Nwanoku, OBE, founder and director of the Chineke! Foundation, Craig Hassall, Chief Executive, Royal Albert Hall and Will Alsop, OBE, Stirling Prize-winning Architect, aLL Design.

Submissions are made online, and close date on March 19, 2018. The shortlists will be announced on 30 March, and the finalists – three in each category – on April 18, 2018.

The winners will be announced at an awards ceremony in central London, to be held in May 2018.

Emerge is actively selecting its judging panels to best reflect gender and BAME diversity within the UK, so as to encourage a balanced set of winners in each category and generate the opportunity for dialogue around such issues.

Send me your best images in the photography category of course, that I will be co-jurying with Melissa DeWitt from HOTSHOE Magazine; Brett Rogers OBE from the prestigious Photographer's Gallery and photographer James Hill from the New York Times.

Virginia Hanusik: Into the Quiet and the Light

By Virginia Hanusik

Publisher : Columbia Books on Architecture and the City

2024 | 184 pages

In South Louisiana, where the Mississippi River meets the Gulf of Mexico, water―and the history of controlling it―is omnipresent. Into the Quiet and the Light: Water, Life, and Land Loss in South Louisiana glimpses the vulnerabilities and possibilities of living on the water during an ongoing climate catastrophe and the fallout of the fossil fuel industry―past, present, and future. The book sustains our physical, mental, and emotional connections to these landscapes through a collection of photographs by Virginia Hanusik. Framing the architecture and infrastructure of South Louisiana with both distance and intimacy, introspection and expansiveness, this work engages new memories, microhistories, anecdotes, and insights from scholars, artists, activists, and practitioners working in the region. Unfolding alongside and in dialogue with Hanusik’s photographs, these reflections soberly and hopefully populate images of South Louisiana’s built and natural environments, opening up multiple pathways that defy singularity and complicate the disaster-oriented imagery often associated with the region and its people. In staging these meditations on water, life, and land loss, this book invites readers to join both Hanusik and the contributors in reading multiplicity into South Louisiana’s water-ruled landscapes.

With texts from Richie Blink, Imani Jacqueline Brown, Jessica Dandridge, Rebecca Elliott, Michael Esealuka, T. Mayheart Dardar, Billy Fleming, Andy Horowitz, Arthur Johnson, Louis Michot, Nini Nguyen, Kate Orff, Jessi Parfait, Amy Stelly, Jonathan Tate, Aaron Turner, and John Verdin.

Rawsht Twana: Twana’s Box

By Rawsht Twana

Publisher : Fraglich Publishing

2024 | 252 pages

Twana’s Box' can be described in many ways: a journey through a photographer’s rare archive, documenting the Kurdistan region of Iraq from 1974–1992; a son’s quest to find his lost father, who was murdered by a military regime; a young man’s way to piece together the fragments of a scattered family in a scattered culture; the becoming of a photographer who, through the stories of others, starts to understand his own identity in times of war. 'Twana’s Box' is not only the photo book that holds a selection of Twana Abdullah’s archive; it is a unique insight into a time and place in a region that has since completely transformed. Rawsht has spent years piecing together his father’s negatives and stories. His archival work inspired him to become a photographer himself, working for Metrography – the first independent Iraqi photo agency – before immigrating to Europe. ills colour & bw, 21 x 27 cm, hb, Kurdish/Arabic/English

Akinbode Akinbiyi: Being, Seeing, Wandering

By Akinbode Akinbiyi

Publisher : Spector Books

2024 | 252 pages

Taken across Europe and Africa, Akinbiyi’s images of everyday city life muse on the sociopolitical labyrinths of urban society

Whether in Bamako, Berlin, London, Lagos or Durban, British photographer Akinbode Akinbiyi (born 1946) creates black-and-white street scenes that function as visual metaphors, ruminating on cultural change, social exclusion and colonialism’s effect on urban planning.

Grace Wales Bonner: Dream in the Rhythm

By Grace Wales Bonner

Publisher : The Museum of Modern Art, New York

2024 | 184 pages

A deeply personal meditation on and around modern Black expression, curated by the acclaimed London-based designer
This volume, Grace Wales Bonner: Dream in the Rhythm―Visions of Sound and Spirit in the MoMA Collection, is an artist’s book created by the acclaimed London-based designer Grace Wales Bonner as “an archive of soulful expression.” Through an extraordinary selection of nearly 80 works from The Museum of Modern Art’s collection and archives, this unique volume draws multisensory connections between pictures and poems, music and performance, hearing and touch, gestures and vibrations, and bodies in motion. Photographs, scores and films by artists such as Dawoud Bey, Mark Bradford, Roy DeCarava, Lee Friedlander, David Hammons, Glenn Ligon, Steve McQueen, Lorna Simpson and Ming Smith, among others, are juxtaposed with signal texts by Black authors spanning the past century, including Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, June Jordan, Robin Coste Lewis, Ishmael Reed, Greg Tate, Jean Toomer, Quincy Troupe and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Published on the occasion of the exhibition Artist’s Choice: Grace Wales Bonner―Spirit Movers, this resplendent publication is a deeply personal meditation on and around modern Black expression that echoes Wales Bonner’s own vibrant, virtuosic designs.

Launch of the Emerge Awards

Emerge Prize

Selected Books