W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund is an organisation established to encourage and support individuals who are active in the field of photography for humanitarian purposes. It gives out the W. Eugene Smith Grant and Howard Chapnick Grant.
Since 1979 the fund has worked to seek out independent voices who work and create outside the boundaries of modern publishing and mass media, following the legacy of W. Eugene Smith. The American photojournalist, working between 1936 and 1978, was committed to the documentation of human condition and suffering. He travelled searching to portray and capture people's behaviour in emotional distress.
For more than thirty years the fund has recognized photographers who explore matters of global importance and address them with integrity and courage.
Every year a grant is given to a photographer with an innovative and intriguing sight of humans dealing with social, economical, political or environmental issues.
With the award of the Grant, a $5000 (US) Fellowship is also shared between one or more finalists deemed worthy of special recognition. [15] [25]
In 1996 a new award was added, the Howard Chapnick Grant, to encourage leadership in fields that are complementary to photojournalism, such as editing research or education and management. The grant was established to honor the memory of Howard Chapnick, former president of Black Star picture agency and writer of The Truth Needs No Ally: Inside Photojournalism. The $5000 (US) grant funds a variety of projects which might include a program of further education, research, a special long-term sabbatical project, or an internship to work with a noteworthy group or individual.
Sebastião Ribeiro Salgado Júnior is a Brazilian social documentary photographer and photojournalist.
Chien-Chi Chang is a photographer and member of Magnum Photos.
Paul Graham is a British fine-art and documentary photographer. He has published three survey monographs, along with 17 other publications.
Marcus Bleasdale is a British photojournalist, born in the UK to an Irish family.
Lu Guang (卢广) is a Chinese independent photojournalist. His work consists of large documentary projects on social, environmental, and economic issues, exposing the lives of "people on the margins of Chinese society: coal miners, drug addicts, HIV patients." His stories on pollution and environmental destruction cover topics traditionally under-reported due to the risk of punishment by the Chinese government.
Jane Evelyn Atwood is an American photographer, who has been living in Paris since 1971. Working primarily with documentary photography, Atwood typically follows groups of people or individuals, focusing mostly on people who are on the fringes of society. Atwood has had ten books of her work published, and received the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography, the Grand Prix Paris Match for Photojournalism, the Oskar Barnack Award, the Alfred Eisenstadt Award and the Hasselblad Foundation Grant twice.
Stefano De Luigi is a German-born Italian photographer. De Luigi has been a member of VII Photo Agency since 2008 and lives in Paris.
Matt Black is an American documentary photographer whose work has focused on issues of poverty, migration, and the environment.
Mikhael Subotzky is a South African artist based in Johannesburg. His installation, film, video and photographic work have been exhibited widely in museums and galleries, and received awards including the KLM Paul Huf Award, W. Eugene Smith Grant, Oskar Barnack Award and the Discovery Award at Rencontres d'Arles. He has published the books Beaufort West (2008), Retinal Shift (2012) and, with Patrick Waterhouse, Ponte City (2014). Subotzky is a member of Magnum Photos.
Lisa Barnard is a documentary photographer, political artist, and a reader in photography at University of South Wales. She has published the books Chateau Despair (2012), Hyenas of the Battlefield, Machines in the Garden (2014) and The Canary and the Hammer (2019). Her work has been shown in a number of solo and group exhibitions and she is a recipient of the Albert Renger-Patzsch Award.
Peter van Agtmael is a documentary photographer based in New York. Since 2006 he has concentrated on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their consequences in the United States. He is a member of Magnum Photos.
Maxim Dondyuk is a photographer and visual artist. His professional career began in Ukrainian media as a photojournalist in 2007. He has been freelance since 2010, working on creating and promoting his own documentary projects.
Howard Chapnick (1922–1996) was an American editor, photo editor and a long-term leader of Black Star photo agency.
Kosuke Okahara is a Japanese photographer who covers social issues in the tradition of humanistic documentary photography.
Laura El-Tantawy is a British-Egyptian photographer based in London and Cairo. She works as a freelance news photographer and on personal projects.
Moises Saman is a Spanish-American photographer, based in Tokyo. He is considered "one of the leading conflict photographers of his generation" and is a full member of Magnum Photos. Saman is best known for his photographs from Iraq. His book Discordia (2016) is about the revolution in Egypt and the broader Arab Spring.
Sim Chi Yin is a Singaporean photographer, based between Beijing, China, and London. She works as a documentary photographer and artist who pursues self-directed projects in Asia and is "interested in history, memory, and migration and its consequences". As well as photography she uses film, sound, text and archival material.
Krisanne Johnson is an American photojournalist. She is the winner of the 2011 W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography. Her work on post-apartheid South Africa and on HIV/AIDS and young women in Swaziland has been included in Time,The New Yorker,The New York Times,The Fader, and The Wall Street Journal.
Salih Basheer is a Sudanese documentary photographer, living in exile. During his studies of Geography at Cairo University, Egypt, he started as a self-taught photographer and subsequently studied documentary photography in Denmark.
Justyna Mielnikiewicz is a Polish photographer, based in Tbilisi, Georgia. She works as a documentary photographer and on long-term personal projects about post-Soviet states. She has published Woman with a Monkey (2014) and Ukraine Runs Through It (2019). She won the W. Eugene Smith Grant in 2016.