POVERTY ‧ Masters

WYNG Masters Award For Photography Launch Event

WYNG Foundation announces the first annual WYNG Masters Award for Photography – and WYNG Poverty Project – with an international open call for photographic based work. Each year, the focus of the award is on a socially-relevant theme of importance to Hong Kong and its people and this year the theme is Poverty.

Simon Wheatley, Professional Photographer, who would be hosting a talk to kick off the WYNG Masters Award for Photography -DON’T CALL ME URBAN! The Time of Grime the material and spiritual poverty of London’s inner-city youth will be based around the recently published book of the above title, examining the crisis of London’s inner-city youth. Taking the riots of last summer as a focus – and the search for their explanation – Simon Wheatley will present the chronology of his work from London’s decaying council estates, which began at the end of the 1990s.

Date: Friday 11 May, 2012
Time: 7:00 pm
Venue: Hong Kong Arts Centre McAulay Studio, 2 Harbour Road, Wanchai, Hong Kong
Opening Speech: Ms. Christine Loh, Founder and CEO of Civic Exchange, Trustee WYNG Foundation

To reserve a seat please visit: : http://wyng.hk/wp/registration/

ABOUT SIMON WHEATLEY:

Born in Singapore in 1970, Simon Wheatley pursued a professional career upon winning Time Out London’s Travel Photographer of the Year Award in 1996. After working for newspapers in London he moved to Amsterdam where he moved into magazines and also made his pictures for a forthcoming book ‘Liberal Limits’, which documents the changing social climate of that city around the turn of the millennium. In 2003 he returned to London, where his emerging work with the inner-city youth brought him to the attention of Magnum Photos.

‘DON’T CALL ME URBAN! The Time of Grime’, a photographic account of London’s inner-city youth and their culture of underground music, was hailed as a classic upon its publication at the end of 2010, going to number one on amazon.com in the pop-cultural category. He has recently been establishing himself as a film-maker, directing cutting-edge music videos on London’s underground ‘urban’ scene, and also as photography consultant on ‘My Brother The Devil’, a British feature film set in inner-city London which won best cinematography at The Sundance Festival in 2012.

He is currently directing a documentary film about marginalized youth in the shadows of London’s Olympic Stadium, while engaged in a long-term photography project on the confusions of modern India – the land of his maternal ancestry, where he has been based for much of the past three years.
www.dontcallmeurban.com

For more information please email:[email protected]
Website: http://wyng.hk