ROSL PHOTO 23 Judges
Jocelyn Bain Hogg, documentary photographer and educator.
"I was 6’3”, with a cut-glass accent and a girl’s name. My birth father was an aristocrat, my birth mother was a model. My adopted dad was a Maori but four amazing women brought me up. I had a place at drama school and turned down Oxford University. I became a photographer, covering fashion for Vogue, reportage for the Sunday Times Magazine and spending ten years of my life documenting London’s most notorious gangsters.
I started photographing at Lancing College. Bullied and bad at sport, photography became both release and sanctuary. At lights out, I would run from the dormitory through the shadows, across two courtyards and up six flights of stairs to the school darkroom, to work with light and chemicals listening to new wave music on John Peel’s late night radio show. Sound-tracked by XTC, Magazine and Peter Hammill, I was a non-conformist adolescent in the cloistered and hated environment of a late-seventies boarding school. My first work was published, while still at Lancing, in Harpers & Queen Magazine. Soon after, Jane, my first chaste love, graced the cover of the British Journal of Photography and a spread of the school pictures.
I thought I was set. Then I met Magnum photographer David Hurn that same year who told me to put my prints back in the box and go and learn. So I did. I got a place under his tutelage at Newport College of Art and studied documentary photography for two years. But my face, or rather my accent, didn’t fit. On leaving and feeling distinctly misplaced, I got a job at the BBC as a publicity photographer and moved to London’s Notting Hill.
From 1986 to 1997 I photographed fashion and in the process fell in love. My model girlfriend of four years, who’d been away on fashion’s rite of passage in Milan and Paris, turned down my marriage proposal. With absolute finality, she told me that our time was done. They say adversity shapes or should I say beats us up with a knuckle-duster… but I stopped photographing fashion at that juncture and begun another stage of this journey. Keeping as busy as a broken-hearted person must, I grasped for every job going including photographing Princess Diana’s funeral, and working with a journalist, dressed as Al Capone, who was meeting two London gangsters. A late night and many scotches followed and I made the first steps on the path through British society’s underworld that became The Firm. It’s twenty years now since that project’s premiere at Visa Pour l’Image in Perpignan, where I was interviewed in a Savile Row suit and a perfect, pink silk tie and told that I was ‘so British’. I had finally learned to own myself.
Since then, I’ve become a member of the VII photo agency with seven published books to my doublebarrelled name. I’ve seen the dark side of organised crime, been shot at in Palestine, stood on the podium in Ibiza’s Manumission with Fatboy Slim, winked at by Uma Thurman in Cannes and fallen over in front of Joan Rivers wearing my kilt at The Oscars.
A photographer always, I grabbed my Leica first, not the up-flying garment that exposes a true Scot, or the look on Joan Rivers’ face. It was a smile, I think."
- Jocelyn Bain Hogg
Charlotte Jansen, journalist and arts writer.
Charlotte Jansen is a British Sri Lankan arts journalist based in London. She has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Financial Times, British Vogue, Frieze and The Art Newspaper among others. She is the author of two books on photography: Girl on Girl (LKP, 2017) and Photography Now (Tate/ilex, 2021) and the host of the Dior Talks photography podcast series 'The Female Gaze'.
Seamus Murphy, documentary photographer and filmmaker.
Seamus Murphy is the recipient of seven World Press Photo awards for his photographic work in Afghanistan, Gaza, Lebanon, Sierra Leone, Peru and Ireland. He received The World Understanding Award from POYi in the USA for his work from Afghanistan and a film he made based around this work was nominated for an Emmy and won the Liberty in Media Prize in 2011.
His work has been published and exhibited widely and is in the collection of The Getty Museum, Los Angeles. He has made films for The New Yorker, Channel 4(UK) and MSF.
He is the author of four books including A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan (Saqi Books. 2008) based on 12 trips to the country between 1994 and 2007 and is a chronicle of Afghanistan’s extraordinary recent history. I Am The Beggar of the World (Farrar Straus Giroux. 2014) offers a rare glimpse into the lives of Afghan women through their anonymous Landay poetry.
He has collaborated with musician PJ Harvey on projects for Let England Shake and The Hope Six Demolition Project, for which he won a Q Award for Best Music Film in October 2016. Murphy and Harvey together published The Hollow of the Hand(Bloomsbury. 2015) a book of his photography and her poetry. An exhibition and live presentation of elements from The Hollow of the Hand work took place at the Royal Festival Hall, London in 2015 and at Les Recontres d’Arles in France in 2016.
As a filmmaker Murphy has released The Republic(Allen Lane. 2016) an immediate and personal photographic portrait of Ireland and was exhibited at The Little Museum in Dublin in 2017; A Dog Called Money(2019), is a documentary feature film Murphy shot and directed about his collaboration with PJ Harvey was premiered at the Berlinale in 2019 before going on general cinema release and The Peculiar Sensation of Being Pat Ingoldsby(2022), a documentary feature film Murphy shot and directed about the maverick Irish poet. released in November 2022.
Photo credit: Justin McKie
Hannah Starkey, artist.
Hannah Starkey is an accomplished contemporary photographer who captures unique moments of women in the inner city. Her work focuses on the female perspective and experience and often sets unidentifiable subjects against visually alluring settings. Elements of street photography and cinematic narrative can be seen in her work and mirrors are a prevalent recurring theme in her photography.
Born in Belfast in 1971, Hannah studied photography and film at Napier University, Edinburgh as well as photography at the Royal College of Art, London. After moving to London permanently she began to photograph women, often actors or friends, set against urban backdrops. Her works are instantly recognisable and depict women as they are with props and mirrored surfaces used to heighten emotion and the connection between subject and onlooker. They stand to counteract the culture where photographs of women are largely created by and for men.
Hannah has exhibited all over Europe including at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Fotografie, Cologne; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; Cornerhouse, Manchester; Ormeau Baths Gallery Belfast; Maureen Paley, London, and the Mead Gallery, Warwick. She has been awarded the Vogue Condé Nast Award (1997); the 3rd International Tokyo Photo Biennale’s Award for Excellence (1999), the St. James Group Ltd Photography Prize (2002), and the Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society (2019).
By Louise Sinnerton
Nilupa Yasmin, artist and educator.
Nilupa Yasmin is an artist and educator with a primarily lens-based practice. She explores the principles of art and craft and the expanded materiality within photography. Yasmin is interested in the notion of culture, self-identity, and anthropology. Whilst investigating ideals and traditions that are close to home, she repeatedly draws upon her own identity through gender, religion and her British Bangladeshi culture and heritage. An element of her practice focuses on socially engaged photography, she works collaboratively with various communities to produce and curate works of Art. Within her educational programme she implements and highlights feminist narratives focusing on women of colour, alongside offering an alternative perspective to westernised art books. Yasmin’s work is included in many permanent and private collections including Government Art Collection, The New Art Gallery Walsall and Birmingham Museums Collection. She is a Lecturer in Photography and recently completed her MA in Photography Arts at University of Westminster.
Past Competitions