Perpignan Awards: Getty Grants, Visa d'or Daily Press

Just announced tonight at Visa pour l'Image in Perpignan, France:

• Mona Reeder of the The Dallas Morning News has won the Visa d'or International Daily Press Award. Thirty-one photographers from newspapers around the world were nominated. This is the first time an American newspaper photographer has won since 2003, when the prize went to Cheryl Diaz Meyer – also of The Dallas Morning News.
• Lynsey Addario, David Gillanders and Eugene Richards have won the latest three Getty Images Grants for Editorial Photography, worth $20,000 each.
• Getty Images (which is one of the Visa pour l'Image sponsors for the first time this year) also announced a new student competition that will offer four $5,000 grants a year to photojournalism students. The full press release follows.

Still to come: The Visa d'or Feature award will be announced Friday night, and the Visa d'Or News award will be announced Saturday night. You will see the winners first on the PDNOnline Twitter feed.

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PRESS RELEASE:

Three Photojournalists win Getty Images Grants for Editorial Photography
Program Expands to Celebrate Fifth Year

NEW YORK, NEW YORK and PERPIGNAN, FRANCE – September 4, 2008 – Getty Images announced today that Lynsey Addario, David Gillanders and Eugene Richards have been selected as the next three recipients of the Getty Images Grants for Editorial Photography.

Each recipient will receive $20,000 and collaborative support from Getty Images photo editors as they pursue their documentary photography projects.

Their portfolios were selected from a field of 153 applicants from 26 countries by a prestigious panel of judges including:
•    Monica Allende, picture editor of the Sunday Times Magazine, London
•    Ruth Eichhorn, director of photography, GEO Magazine, Germany
•    Jean-Francois Leroy, director general, Visa Pour l’Image, France
•    Tom Stoddart, photojournalist, Getty Images, UK

Lynsey Addario’s project, “Darfur,” will examine the ongoing conflict in western Sudan, which began in early 2003 and has left an estimated 200,000 dead from the resulting violence, sickness and hunger while forcing approximately 2.5 million people from their homes. Lynsey first photographed the situation in 2004 and since then has returned to cover it for at least one month each year, commenting, “As a photojournalist, I find it almost impossible to ignore the conflict in Darfur, one of the greatest displays of ethnic cleansing and spawning one of the gravest humanitarian crises of our time.” Lynsey plans to use her Getty Images Grant for Editorial Photography to continue this coverage, including one trip to Darfur and one to the refugee camps in neighboring Chad. She is currently based in Istanbul, Turkey.

David Gillanders’ project “Glasgow,” will focus on the culture of violent knife crime – a legacy of the Scottish clan culture – which has earned Scotland’s largest city the title “Murder Capital of Europe.” David says, “As a native Glaswegian, I wanted to draw attention to this phenomenon, which blights my city and ruins lives each and every day. Barbaric, violent crime has become so commonplace that it is almost an accepted way of life.”

His previous work on this subject reveals the severity of the problems that knife crime imposes on Glasgow. His grant project will be to take a closer look at the lives of the families he has met who are involved with knife culture. David believes that the end result will be a strong profile of the modern Scottish clan system, and concludes that, “The Getty Images Grant for Editorial Photography will provide me with a financial lifeline, ensuring my ability to continue this project uninterrupted to completion.”

Eugene Richards began work on “War is Personal” in 2006 as a series of photo and text essays focused on the lives of people in the US who’d been profoundly affected by the war in Iraq. Eugene’s grant will be used to move the project forward in the coming months. “Eight photographic essays are now completed,” he commented. “With the assistance of a Getty Images Grant for Editorial Photography, I will undertake at least seven more.” At the completion of the project there will be a book and a multimedia piece that interposes photographs with personal writings and interviews to advance the dialogue on the Iraq war. Based in New York, Eugene is a noted photojournalist, writer and filmmaker who is represented by Magnum Photos.

Getty Images Grants for Editorial Photography begins its fifth year of commitment to photojournalists by affirming that five grants totaling $100,000 will again be awarded to professional photojournalists in 2009. In addition, Getty Images is expanding the program by including a student category to identify and encourage promising photojournalism students throughout the world. Four grants of $5,000 each will be made to students under 30 who are enrolled in a full-time, accredited photojournalism course.

More information about the grant winners, judges and the new student category can be found at www.gettyimages.com/editorial-grants.   

Comments

[daniel Sheehan]

Thanks for all of the updates and bring the news of this festival to all of us unable to attend.