Head On Photo Awards 2017 Winners

Head On Photo Awards

Blind girl playing in a dumpsite near an impromptu refugee campsite in Eidomeni, Greece.

 

Prolific Instagrammer Lara Verheijden holds her presence with conviction; she is herself and is neither shaped by society nor exhibits for the sake of showing off. She is so comfortable in her skin it is almost as if she grew up in a cave without the media and opinions to shape her identity. Yet, at the same time, she is empathic and aware, an unusual combination in someone so young. I didn’t choose to photograph Lara because of her harelip, but because I of her spirit and rawness as well as her confidence and infectious humour.

 

Mediterranean Sea, 1 August 2016. Amadou Sumaila (16), from Mali, poses for a portrait after being rescued on the Mediterranean Sea, 20 nautical miles off the Libyan coast by a rescue vessel provided by the NGO Jugend Rettet. The rubber boat in which he travelled carried 118 people on board, who were transferred by the Italian Coast Guard to Lampedusa.

 

“My name is Nathan Maynard, my father is Darrell Maynard and my grandparents were Benjamin Tasman Maynard and Stella Mansell, who were born on Cape Barron and Flinders islands, Tasmania.

My family belong to a community that are known as the mutton bird people. A people who harvest the mutton bird which nests in the Bass Strait islands – a cultural practice known as ‘the birding’.

I come from a proud community, a proud family, a proud birding family who have harvested mutton birds every year since the beginning of time. This is my son Clay”.

 

This image was taken at Lake Jindabyne after heavy rains in the spring of 2016. It is part of an ongoing series documenting the landscapes, architecture, recreation and infrastructure of the Snowy Hydro Scheme in New South Wales.

 

Descendants of mares and stallions brought to Australia by British settlers over 200 years ago, wild brumbies have survived the dry outback, snow-covered mountains and thick bushland regions. Australia is thought to have the largest population of wild horses in the world, however, the future of the brumby in the Snowy Mountains in New South Wales is uncertain. In order to protect fragile alpine and sub-alpine environments, the state government is implementing a ‘wild horse management plan’ that aims to cull 90% of the brumbies over the next 20 years. An emotive and complex issue that divides the community.

 

Broken glass from bottles are piled up for recycling at the Phoenicia Glass Works Ltd. factory in the southern Israeli town of Yeruham.

 

This image of a rock formation at Lake Mungo is actually a colour image and not a B&W conversion. This is the natural colour of the rocks when lit by pure white LED’s from a drone. Some green can be made out on the small bushes to the right.

 

As an artist in residence in December 2016 at a hotel on Cabarita Beach on New South Wales’s far north coast. I was struck by the region’s raw beauty and moved by the spirituality of Mount Warning as an ancient epicenter of indigenous life. Here Mount Warning is depicted in a local mural near Murwillumbah.

 

Landscape can offer more than sense of space; it can also present a context in which stories are told. As a film director I tell stories with fixed beginnings and ends. This image is part of “Invitation to Story”, a series that subverts this paradigm. Landscape becomes a canvas for an untold story, inviting us to participate in its creation and to consider the question of whether the author or the observer owns the narrative.

 

A late night trip to the Emergency Room after a nasty fall at a school fete. This was taken at 2am after seeing multiple nurses and a doctor. Nothing serious, just a hip that was bruised and sore.

 

Life in a hospital is easy during the day: you wait for the next IV to finish, for the next result to be delivered, for the next visitor to pop in. But the night always comes and with it, silence. The lights dim down, everyone is quiet and you can hear your own breath. You can hear your own fears. At night, my father told me he would close his eyes, quiet his mind, shut his pain away and imagine he was sleeping at home, on a lazy Sunday morning.

 

The sea passage between Greece and Turkey – usually referred to by migrants and refugees as the ‘death passage’ – during a tempest that caused a temporary halt in the arrival of dinghies from the Turkish coast.

 

In ‘Animated’, I asked my best friend to play some music and dance to her heart’s content. The slow shutter speed caused her sequinned top to resemble sparks flying around her, representing energy and liveliness.

 

Recorded levels of anxiety related disorders in 18 – 34 year olds is at its highest ever. We need to ask – are we really the most mentally ill generation? Or have medical advancements and psychological research enabled an increase in diagnosis? An extensive range of issues  such as stress over education, money, careers ad social issuesthat all affect mental health. However Millenials are also slightly obsessed with labels and self diagnosing their less favourable personality traits which could also affect the way mental illnesses are perceived in society. This image depicts the raw emotion of a panic attack in an attempt to help suffers feel more comfortable talking about it after seeing it in a public setting.