AUTO PHOTO Awards celebrate the best automotive photography, connecting photographers and the automotive industry, and offering opportunities for everyone. We are dedicated to showcasing the best automotive photographers, creating opportunities for collaborations and commissions, and uniting everyone through our shared passions.
We are pleased to introduce you to the AUTO PHOTO Awards judges, both share a lifelong passion for photography, and a love of all things automotive.
Charles Richmond started taking photographs seriously at the age of twelve under the name of Charles Settrington. Having left school at sixteen, he began his professional involvement with the medium as an apprentice to the film director Stanley Kubrick, working on Kubrick’s masterpiece Barry Lyndon. This was followed by a stint as a documentary photographer in Africa, working for various magazines, before launching a career in still life photography. He worked on many of the great advertising campaigns of the 1980s including Benson & Hedges, Silk Cut, Levi’s, and ICI. One of his pictures, Shadows (for Osborne and Little), was selected for the Pompidou Centre’s permanent exhibition One Hundred Images of Advertising Photography from 1930-1990.
In 1991, after fifteen years in the industry, family responsibility called Charles March (as he was then) back to Goodwood, the estate owned by his family since the late seventeenth century. In 2012, he publicly exhibited his Nature Translated series, which for him represented the antithesis of the precision of high production still life advertising of the 1990s. Nature Translated went on to be exhibited in the State Russian Museum (Marble Palace) in St. Petersburg, and the Moscow Photography Biennale 2014 (curated by Olga Sviblova) and in 2013 was selected for inclusion in Landmark: The Fields of Photography show at Somerset House, London, curated by William Ewing. Nature Translated was followed by two new critically-acclaimed exhibitions in New York at the Venus over Manhattan Gallery (Wood Land) and London at Hamilton’s Gallery (Abstract & Intentional) and more recently his Seascape exhibition was shown in Los Angeles and London. In 2018, a solo exhibition was held at the Galleria del Cembalo, Palazzo Borghese, Rome which included photographs from his new book, Gleann Badraig, all taken on the Scottish island of Jura. He has won many awards and his work is held in a number of private and public collections.
Aside from his photography, Charles Richmond (as he now is), has instigated at Goodwood two internationally-acclaimed motorsport events. In 1993, he held the first Festival of Speed in the park at Goodwood where competitors race up the drive and the famous Goodwood hill climb for the fastest time. This annual event has become the largest car culture event in the world. In 1998, he held the first Goodwood Revival meeting at the reopened historic Goodwood Motor Circuit, first opened by his grandfather, the racing driver Freddie March (later 9th Duke of Richmond), in 1948 at the former RAF Westhampnett, a World War II fighter-pilot station. The Goodwood Revival celebrates those historic racing days when the circuit was open from 1948-1966, and is held entirely in a period theme, the largest sporting event in the world to do so.
Karen is the Creative Director of Shutter Hub, the UK based photography organisation providing opportunities and support for creative photographers worldwide. She founded the organisation to create a supportive community for photographers and to provide a platform for the development of ideas and careers. She is dedicated to creating fair access to photography and opening up opportunities for everyone.
Karen works to bring innovative ideas and fundamental kindness to every project. She has won awards for photography, writing and community development. Karen received the Global X Foundation Award for Innovation 2018, was named the Digital Influencer of the Year 2019 at the Dutch Press Awards, and in 2022 was given a Barclays Social Entrepreneur Award for positively driving social and environmental change through business.
‘I love photography and what it can do; how it can connect people and help share stories, how it provides a different perspective and a means of escapism – and I love cars and driving for pretty much the same reasons!’ – and that’s how the AUTO PHOTO Awards were born!
Whether it’s competing on track in her Lotus Elise, running errands in her Mk4 Golf GTI, or meandering through the countryside in her old Audi 100, when’s she’s not working on Shutter Hub, or the various other projects she’s involved with, Karen will most certainly be found near a car.