The Open Society Fellowship supports individuals pursuing innovative and unconventional approaches to fundamental open society challenges to enrich public understanding of those challenges and stimulate far-reaching and probing conversations within the Open Society Foundations and in the world.
Category: photography
Open Society Documentary Photography Project
The Open Society Documentary Photography Project offers grants for documentary photographers from Central Asia, the South Caucasus, Afghanistan, Mongolia, and Pakistan. The fund awards approximately ten cash stipends in the amount of $3,500 USD each to photographers to produce a photo essay on a critical human rights or social issue in the region. Along with the stipend, successful applicants will receive two master-level workshops on visual storytelling through photography and multimedia. Watch the Open Society website for information about the next round.
Photographic Museum of Humanity
The Photographic Museum of Humanity Grant is an international contest with the aim to finance talented photographers and discover new talents. A total of $4,000 will be awarded.
Photocrati Fund
The Photocrati Fund offers a $5,000 grant to a photographer to undertake an important humanitarian and environmental photography project. Our goal is to identify outstanding photographers and to provide the resources necessary to pursue projects that will have a tangible and positive effect on the world.
PhotoPhilanthropy Activist Awards
The PhotoPhilanthropy Activist Awards identify outstanding work done by photographers in collaboration with nonprofit organizations worldwide, with prizes ranging from $2,000-$15,000. The application period begins in October.
Soros Justice Fellowships
The Soros Justice Fellowships Program’s Media Fellowships is for individuals with distinctive voices proposing to complete media projects that engage and inform, spur debate and conversation, and catalyze change on important U.S. criminal justice issues. Deadline is in October. Watch the Open Society website for the next round.
Rory Peck Training Fund
The Rory Peck Training Fund makes hostile environment training affordable for freelancers. Since its launch in 2000, the Fund has given over 500 bursaries to freelance journalists, photographers, cameramen and filmmakers, enabling them to gain the vital skills and knowledge needed for work in hostile environments. The Trust works with five approved course providers. You must take your training with one of them, but it is up to you which one.
Rory Peck Trust Assistance Grants
Rory Peck Trust offers individual grants to freelance newsgatherers and/or their families who find themselves in a critical situation. This includes freelancers who have been threatened, imprisoned or injured, forced into hiding or exile, or killed.
Tim Hetherington Grant
The Tim Hetherington Grant is an annual grant awarded to a photographer to finalize a project on a human rights theme. It is open to professional photographers who have participated in a recent World Press Photo Contest. Applications are accepted in October every year.
Deadline for Alexia Photography Grant Approaching
The Alexia grant is a phenomenal award that provides grants and scholarships to photojournalists, enabling them to create work that gives voice to those who go unheard, fosters cultural understanding and exposes social injustice. In 2000, this grant changed my life when I won the professional grant. I was young and inexperienced and it allowed me to start my first story in the tiny, impoverished country of Guinea Bissau. It was there – without the pressure of a deadline, or the expectation of a magazine that I learned the importance of patience, of taking time to tell a story. I thought I would stay a month but ended up living there for a half year, telling the stories of how the majority of people on this planet live. It was a powerful turning point when I realized I want to spend my life working to highlight the commonalities of human existence rather than our differences. It was also at that moment I realized that I was not going to be just a photographer. I was also going to be a storyteller.
The deadline for The Alexia Foundation Professional and Student Grants is Jan. 13, 2014 at 2 p.m. Eastern Time. The Professional Grant carries a prize of $20,000 for a professional photographer to produce a substantial photo or multimedia story that makes the world a better place. There are a total of six Student Grants available. The student winner will receive funding for a semester at the Syracuse University London Program, a $1,000 cash grant to help produce the proposed body of work, a $300 gift card from Dury’s Photo and $500 will be awarded to that student’s academic department. Student awards will also be given to a Second Place Winner, and three Award of Excellence Winners.
This year, a new student grant has been added, The Gilka Grant, honoring Robert E. Gilka, the longtime director of photography for National Geographic Magazine and an important supporter of The Alexia Foundation. The Gilka Grant will recognize the best project proposal that also includes a multimedia component. The winner will receive a $1,500 scholarship to attend the Kalish Workshop.
I hope you apply and submit those proposals that inspire us. At the end of the day all of us are not only photographers. We are storytellers and its important to cover not just the headlines but also to focus on the stories that unite us. Good luck!
Link to student grant: http://www.alexiafoundation.org/grants/student_rules
Link to professional rules: http://www.alexiafoundation.org/grants/professional_rules
Link to grants page: http://www.alexiafoundation.org/grants
