The deadline for applications for the 2011 W. Eugene Smith Grant for Humanistic Photography is Friday, June 3. The $30,000 grant is given annually to recognize and support a photographer pursuing a humanistic photography project in the tradition of photojournalist W. Eugene Smith.  An additional $5,000 in fellowship money is dispersed, at the discretion of the jury, to one or more finalists deemed worthy of special recognition.

The W. Eugene Smith Fund chooses a three-member jury to evaluate the written proposals for the grant and submitted images.  Past recipients have included Darcy Padilla, Paolo Pellegrin, Ernesto Bazan, Lu Guang, Stanley Greene, Chien-Chi Chang, Graciela Iturbide, Brenda Ann Kenneally, and James Nachtwey.

Applications, rules and instructions can be found on the Smith Fund web site.

The Smith Fund Web site has just been redesigned by MediaStorm (one of the grant sponsors) and incorporates the MediaStorm Player.  Expanded slide shows by past grant recipients back to 1980 can now be viewed on the site. You can also donate to the fund through the site, to continue its support of photojournalism.

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Four photographers have been selected to share a $65,000 special grant to support documentary coverage of the Sahrawi people of Africa and their ongoing struggle for independence in a disputed region of the Western Sahara, the Aftermath Project has announced.

Photographers Stephen Ferry of the US, Christian Tasso of Italy, Simona Ghizzoni of Italy, and Arthur Conrad Kisitu of Uganda will receive money to support their various projects about daily life, culture, and the role of women in the Sahrawi community.

The grant funding was provided by the Howard G. Buffet foundation. It supports global health, humanitarian, and conservation projects, and is administered by the son of billionaire Warren Buffet.

The Aftermath Project is serving as a grant administrator. It supports photographers covering the aftermath of war by awarding its own grants each fall.

The winners for the Sahrawi grant were selected from 101 applications submitted from around the world. Judges included Stephen Mayes, director of VII; Denise Wolff, editor of Aperture, and Sara Terry, director/founder of the Aftermath project.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced the winners of its 2011 Guggenheim Fellowships yesterday. Eight photographers were among the roughly 80 individuals awarded fellowships in the Creative Arts:  Katherine Turczan, Karolina Karlic, Jonathan Lowenstein,  Richard Mosse, Pipo Hieu Nguyen-duy, Betsy Schneider, Penelope Umbrico and John M. Willis.

http://www.gf.org/fellows

The prestigious Fellowships, typically awarded to “midcareer” artists and scholars to allow them to pursue their work independently for a minimum of six months to a maximum of one year.  The Fellowships awarded in four categories: Creative Arts, Humanities, Social Science and Natural Science. Applicants submit examples of recent work and a statement of their plans for the period of the Fellowship.

Founded in 1922, the Fellowship program is intended to “add to the educational, literary, artistic, and scientific power of this country, and also to provide for the cause of better international understanding,” Photographers who have previously won Guggenheim Fellowships include Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Robert Adams, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Lewis Baltz. Robert Frank, Ray K. Metzker and Joel Meyerowitz.

Information on applying for Guggenheim Fellowships can be found on the Guggenheim Foundation web site.

Getty Images is now accepting applications for its 2011 Grants for Editorial Photography. Five grants of $20,000 apiece will be awarded to support photographers pursuing “projects of personal and journalistic significance.” The deadline to apply is May 1, and winners will be announced in September.

The judges for this year’s grants are photographer Tom Stoddart; Cyril Drouhet, director of photography, Le Figaro; Emanuelle Mirabelli, photo editor for Marie Claire Italy; Jon Jones, director of photography, The Sunday Times of London; and Jean-Francois LeRoy, director general of the Visa Pour L’Image festival in Perpignan, France.

This year, the grant is open to photographers who work as part of a team. Past winners of Getty Grants for Editorial Photography include Stefano de Luigi, Darcy Padilla,  Brenda Ann Kenneally, Alex Majoli, Rena Effendi and Lynsey Addario.

Getty is also offering a grant for students. The student grant includes no prize money; instead the winning student is featured on Reportage by Getty Images. For information on the student grant, email grants@gettyimages.com.

© Anastasia Taylor-Lind

FNAC has awarded grants of 8,000 Euros (about $10,800 US)  apiece to three photojournalists. The grants, which support original photo projects, were initiated by FNAC, the France-based entertainment retailer, last year during the Visa Pour L’Image festival in Perpignan, France.

A jury of 15 photo editors around the world were asked to nominate photojournalists who are working on ongoing projects. Three photographers were chosen from 46 nominations:

Jan Banning – for his project “Law & Order.” Banning plans to make a comparison of eight legal systems in both rural and urban settings. Banning began working on the project in Uganda in May 2010.

Cedric Gerbehaye – for his project on the effects of population movements and reconstruction efforts in Sudan.

Anastasia Taylor-Lind –  Having photographed females in the armed forces in Russia and the Crimea, Taylor-Lind plans to use her grant to photograph the Asgarda women in the Carpathian mountains, female prisoners in Afghanistan, and women in other isolated communities.

The three projects will be shown at this year’s Visa Pour L’Image, which is scheduled to take place August 27 to September 11. The projects will also be exhibited at FNAC photo galleries throughout France.

The Aftermath Project, an organization that awards money to photographers pursuing post-conflict documentary projects, announced a special $65,000 grant cycle funded by the Howard G. Buffet Foundation. Up to three grants totaling $65,000 will be awarded to photographers to fund stories about the Sahrawi, who are indigenous to a disputed section of the Western Sahara and are struggling for independence.

According to the grant guidelines, the projects funded by the grants will address “the aftermath issues that frame [the Sahrawi’s] ongoing struggle for independence, both in refugee camps and in diaspora.”

One of the awards will be made to an African photographer.

The Howard G. Buffett Foundation, which supports global health, humanitarian and conservation initiatives among other projects, is administered by Howard Graham Buffett, the son of investor and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett.

Grant-winners are expected to donate prints to both the Aftermath Project and the HGBF, and to provide images for educational programs developed by the two organizations.

The deadline for applications is March 25, 2011.

More information and to apply visit www.theaftermathproject.org.

The Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke University will not award a Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize in 2011. CDS awards director Alexa Dilworth says the prize, which supports collaboration between a documentary photographer and a writer, will take a one-year “hiatus.”  Dilworth tells PDN, “We are taking a year to explore ideas for supporting projects that use words and images in other ways besides stand-alone essays and still imagery–audio, multimedia, etc. –and we haven’t arrived there yet.”

According to the Lange-Taylor Prize web site, the decision to suspend the prize reflects “the rapidly changing environment in which documentary artists conduct their work.” Discussions about the future of the prize began in June 2010, which marked the 20th anniversary of the prize, Dilworth says, and included CDS executive director Tom Rankin, former director and Lange-Taylor prize co-founder Iris Tillman Hill, and former director  and director of programs and communications Lynn McKnight.  “We are talking amongst ourselves and with other colleagues at CDS about what collaboration, combining words and images, and ‘still’ photography, among other things, look like in the 21st century,” Dilworth says.

Rankin notes, “Everything in higher education, and at Duke, is getting a fresh look on the heels of a historic recession,” but says that CDS’s funding for the Lange-Taylor prize is not in jeopardy. “Our hiatus and reflection on the future of Lange-Taylor coincides with both the 20th anniversary of the prize and budget challenges, but the decision is in no way directly tied to finances, or to any outside funder’s restrictions on support.”

Dilworth notes that CDS continues to support photography and documentary work in other ways. It continues to administer the  First Book Prize given by the Honickman Foundation. In the past year CDS has launched a new photography prize in collaboration with Daylight Magazine, and has made the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival part of CDS.

Dilworth adds that she hopes with the hiatus,  “We at the Center for Documentary Studies might come up with new ways of supporting documentary artists involved in extended fieldwork projects and who are interested in producing nonfiction narratives that resonate with personal experience.”

Davide Monteleone of Italy has won the $20,000 Aftermath Project Grant for his project “Red Thistle” The Northern Caucasus Journey.” The Aftermath Project, which supports documentary photo projects about regions that have experienced conflict, announced the winner and finalists for the grant on December 14.

Monteleone was previously a finalist for the 2009 Aftermath Project Grant for his work in the Caucasus. Sara Terry, photojournalist and founder of The Aftermath Project, says this is the first time a finalist has gone on to win the grant. “The work he submitted this year showed a remarkable deepening of his work and a much more clearly articulated statement of the aftermath he is seeking to illuminate.”

The Aftermath Project also announced four finalists:

Miquel Dewever-Plana, France: “Guatemala: The Other War”

Elizabeth Herman, US: “Women Warriors: Bangladesh”

Massimo Mastrorillo and Lara Ciarabellini, Italy: “Bosnia y Herzegovina – If Chaos Awakens the Madness”

Carlos Javier Ortiz, US: “Too Young to Die”

The winner and finalists were selected from 155 applicants. An initial screening was done in mid-November by Terry and Lesley Meyer of the Annenberg Space for Photography. The remaining submissions were then judged by Terry; Stephen Mayes, managing director of the VII Photo Agency; Denise Wolff, book editor at Aperture; and Jeff Jacobson, photojournalist and board member of The Aftermath Project.

Images from the grant winner and finalists  will be online in early 2011 at www.theaftermathproject.org.

The Aftermath Project grant is supported by the Foundation to Promote Open Society. The Aftermath Project, a non-profit, is also supported by the Compton Foundation and tax-deductible donations from individuals.

The Open Society Documentary Photography Project yesterday announced the winners of this year’s Audience Engagement Grants. Founded in 2005 with the name “the Distribution Grant,” the grant seeks to engage communities and decision makers in human rights and social justice issues. Each year, five to eight grants ranging from $5,000 to $30,000 are awarded to photographers who have partnered with individuals or organizations to disseminate their finished photography projects to the public.

This year,  eight grantees were selected:

Andrew Agaba will partner with Africa Leadership Institute (www.aflia.org) on KALISOLISO: The People are Watching, a newspaper supplement, poster campaign, touring exhibition, and blog designed to prevent pre- and post-election violence in Uganda in the February 2011 general elections.

Alit Ambara will partner with Institut Sejarah Sosial Indonesia (ISSI) to present photographs of the victims of the 1965–66 violence in an interactive, multimedia teaching module to be used in Indonesian high school history classes.

Donna De Cesare will partner with Universidad Centroamericana in San Salvador and the The Mesoamerica Center in Antiqua, Guatemala, to combine photography, theater, and skills-based media workshops for youth to address the complex ways that gang violence and migration impact the human rights of young people in Central America.

Kunda Dixit will partner with Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya, the principal archive of books in the Nepali language, to produce Shanti Sangralaya, an educational curriculum and permanent exhibition of photographs, texts, maps, and graphics about the 1996–2006 insurgency in Nepal.

Stephen Ferry will partner with Consejo de Redación in Bogota to create Violentología: Un manual del conflicto colombiano, a visual resource that will be distributed to journalists, editors, and archivists to to instruct and encourage the photographic coverage of Colombia’s human rights crisis.

FIERCE, a membership-based organization in New York City, will partner with Marvin Taylor on Queer Pier: 40 Years, an exhibition and community archiving project that will serve as a tool for FIERCE’s ongoing grassroots organizing and leadership development programs for LGBTQ youth of color in New York City.

Lorena Ros will partner with La Fundación Vicki Bernadet in Barcelona to use Unspoken—a book and multimedia project on adult survivors of child sexual abuse—to create an experiential workshop designed to raise awareness and reach out to women survivors in the Spanish prison system.

Jean-Marie Simon will partner with Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado de Guatemala and Estudio A2 (www.a2foto.com) to create a newspaper supplement and a multi-lingual DVD based on her book Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny, which documents the height of Guatemala’s civil war in the 1980s.

Information on the grants and application guidelines can be found on the Soros Foundation web site.