David Larsen is the Founder and Director of Africa Media Online (AMO). A journalist and photographer by trade David founded AMO in 2000. AMO enables Africans to tell Africa’s story by creating a digital trade route for African photographers to present their work to African and global markets. An award-winning journalist, David has been a judge at the China Photo Press Awards, a nominator for the World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass, a judge in the Sony Profoto Awards in South Africa, the innovator of the Twenty Ten project funded by the Dutch Postcode Lottery and carried out in partnership with World Press Photo, the initiator the the African Photo Entrepreneur Programme and the leader of the Shutha.org free online resource for photographers in the Majority World. He also had a hand in initiating the Majority World photo agency and has hosted the DocuFest Africa festival and the World Press Photo Exhibition in South Africa.

AMO enables Africans to tell Africa’s story by creating a digital trade route for African media and heritage organisations to present their collections to African and global audiences. David led the writing of the best practices section of South Africa’s national policy on the digitisation of heritage resources and he has assisted a number of regional and national heritage organisations in South Africa to develop a digital archives strategy. He has also established AMO’s Heritage Digital Campus that trains institutions and organisations in the fundamentals of developing a digital archive. Under David’s leadership AMO has established a specialist digitisation service that is able to meet the highest international standards and as a consequence counts among its clients the Rijksmuseum, the Google Cultural Institute and the Brenthurst Library among many others. Under David’s leadership AMO has developed Preservatio, Africa’s first African-developed digital asset management system for long-term preservation of African media and heritage collections. Managing Director of AMO for 21 years, David has now shifted his role to focus on innovation, marketing and sales and established African Pictures (Pty) Ltd as a wholly owned subsidiary of Africa Media Online (Pty) Ltd to expand the output side of Africa Media Online’s digital trade route including image licensing and future demand side income streams. AMO also represents a number of leading digital workflow and digital asset management systems including MediaGraph and Limecraft. Limecraft is used by the Associated Press to enable access to its footage library.