Getty Images has (finally) announced the winners of the February 2009 prizes. The two big winners of the $20,000 professional grants are dvafoto favorites Alex Majoli and Paolo Pellegrin, both Italian photographers from Magnum. They are continuing large projects of theirs that we have seen previously: Majoli produced a terrific ‘Magnum in Motion’ piece of his project Requiem in Samba a year or two ago and Pellegrin’s project “Iraqi Refugees” was shown in an exhibition at Visa Pour l’Image this past year as ‘The Iraqi Diaspora’ to rave reviews. Deep congratulations to both for extremely worthy projects (be sure to read their proposals on the Getty site), I cannot wait to see more work from both.

Also announced were the first in a series of Student Grants of $5,000, to Bolivian photographer (by way of the US) Maximiliano Braun for his project “Stay With Me”. He writes, “The Getty Images grant will allow me to continue a project I began in South Africa, looking into the lives of families caring for a relative living in a vegetative state due to brain damage.” The other winner is German photographer Andy Spyra for his ongoing work in Kashmir documenting the results of the long-simmering war there. Terrific pictures.

On a side note, I’m so excited to see that Alex Majoli is shooting more editorial work again. (And that picture I posted above has long been a favorite of mine). For example, see his coverage of Pakistan, to the Russo-Georgian Conflict and most recently the latest Israel-Gaza Conflict on the Magnum site.