I am really happy to announce the winner of our inaugural "F-Stop Collaborate and Listen" podcast Landscape Conservation Award!
The Award
The goal of this award was to recognize an individual photographer who is highly involved in conservation issues within their local communities or within the landscape and nature photography community. This could be through their writing, speaking, photography projects, or community organizing efforts. Additionally, we wanted to recognize an individual that actively practices the Nature First Principles. In partnership with our Patreon supporters, the “F-Stop Collaborate and Listen” podcast presents the prestigious honor, and a cash prize of $1,500.
We had six total nominees for the award. Thank you to the folks that stepped up and nominated a photographer for the award.
Our Nominees
We had some amazing nominees for the award, please spend some time looking at their work and learning about them:
Michael Gordon, Kayla Sulak, Phill Monson, Michael Remke, Erik Stensland, and J Henry Fair.
Our goal for the award is to recognize an individual photographer who is highly involved in conservation issues within their local communities or within the landscape and nature photography community. This could be through their writing, speaking, photography projects, or community organizing efforts. Additionally, one of the goals of this award was to recognize an individual that is actively practicing the Nature First Principles.
Our Award Criteria
We had four different domains by which each nominee was rated on a scale from one to ten. These four scores were totaled for each domain and then the average of every nominee's total score was calculated. Lastly, the average total score for each nominee was reached by dividing their total score by eight (which was the number of judges we had).
In the end it was a very close contest with the total averages ranging from 29.1 to 35!
The Winner
Congratulations to J Henry Fair for winning the award! Here is what J Henry Fair had to say about his work:
"More than 20 years ago I decided that commercial photography was all about promoting consumption, which is the scourge of the planet, so I devoted myself to conservation causes. It started with local efforts to preserve open space from development, then progressed to international campaigns to persuade companies to change their behavior toward the environment. For a sideline project, I started a wolf center to promote education about wild spaces and foster reintroduction of wolves to the wild."
About the Winner
J Henry Fair uses pictures to tell stories about people and things that affect people. He is based in New York City and Berlin, but travels constantly. His recent book,Industrial Scars: The Hidden Costs of Consumption, published by Papadakis of London, is in to its second edition. His new book, the first of the “Coastline” series, On The Edge: From Combahee To Winyah, was published in spring 2019 and has received fantastic reviews.

Speaking about his “Industrial Scars” series, Roberta Smith, chief art critic of The New York Times said “The vivid color photographs of J Henry Fair lead an uneasy double life as potent records of environmental pollution and as ersatz evocations of abstract painting…information and form work together, to devastating effect.
Keep up the great work J Henry! Please enjoy a selection of J Henry Fair's work below.
I learned a lot through this process and will be sure to take the feedback from our amazing judges and incorporate it into our process next time.
The Judges
Thank you to our eight amazing judges, including:
- Rajesh Jyothiswaran
- Michael Rung
- Candace Dyar
- Julie Boyd
- Greg Whitton
- Wayne Suggs
- Mark Hespenheide
- Nathan St. Andre