All three new jury members of the 2017 Felix Schoeller Photo Award are acknowledged experts in the world of photography. The three are Simone Klein from Magnum Paris, Clara Maria Sels from Duesseldorf Photo Weekend and Julia Sörgel from Welt am Sonntag, Berlin.

Three new members in the jury of five

Michael Dannenmann, chairman of the jury of the Felix Schoeller Photo Award, has been successful in his search for high-profile jury members and now presents the three new jurors. Clara Maria Sels, Gallerist in Düsseldorf, co-founded the Duesseldorf Photo Weekend in 2011 and has held the position of festival director since 2013. In 2014 and 2015, she co-organised the exhibitions in the NRW-Forum Düsseldorf for Duesseldorf Photo Weekend and made the HP Horst exhibition ‘Horst: Photographer of Style’ possible in 2016. Julia Sörgel studied photography in Munich, the city of her birth, and travelled extensively for ten years as a freelance photographer for various magazines. From 2005, she was employed as picture editor at the weekly newspaper ‘Welt am Sonntag’ (WamS) and took over the position of photo editor-in-chief of the magazine ICON, the luxury supplement of the WamS. The third of the trio is Simone Klein, Paris. Simone Klein studied art history, Romance and German languages and literature in Bonn and at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 2007, after several stops along the way, she joined the auctioneers Sotheby`s Europe as Head of Photographs Department Europe with auctions in Paris, London, and New York. In 2015, she was appointed Global Print Sales Director at Magnum Photos. Her diverse tasks in this function include programme planning for the galleries in Paris and London, the organisation of participation at industry fairs and international customer development. ‘I’m particularly proud that I have been able to get these three acknowledged experts to join the new jury. I’m naturally also looking forward to seeing how the international outlook and artistic expertise of these three women will contribute to our work as a jury’, says Dannemann, commenting on his choice. Together with the internationally renowned portrait photographer Michael Dannenmann himself and the American curator and author Gerard A. Goodrow, the jury of five for 2017 is now complete.