This was a very interesting year for me, definitely the busiest since I moved to Belgrade, Serbia in February 2009, filled with lots of travel and some interesting assignments. Notably I had the chance to visit Africa for the first time, on assignment in South Sudan, and received the Burn Magazine Emerging Photographer Fund Grant for my ongoing project “Only Unity”.

I started the year in England, then was in Sarajevo for a story about the 20th anniversary of the start of the war there. My mother came to visit me in Belgrade in April, but our trip was interrupted by Presidential elections in Serbia, which I covered for the Wall Street Journal. That assignment led to one of the strangest days of my career, when I photographed both Serbian President Boris Tadic and former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani hours apart in the same TV studio (see the WSJ article about Giuliani in Belgrade).

Soon after I was documenting the destruction of the Belville Roma settlement. My friend Darko Stanimirović and I handed out disposable cameras to residents of the camp so that they could document the eviction themselves. We published a multimedia piece at Newsmotion.org with these community pictures alongside Stanimirović’s audio recordings, a text by Alan Chin and some of my pictures as “The Sound of Barking Dogs: The Eviction of the Roma from Belville”.

In September I was in South Sudan reporting a story about the future of the Jonglei Canal and the issues of water rights for the youngest country on the planet. The project was commissioned by Austrian magazine 2012, an interesting one-year-only magazine published by Red Bull Media House. I have included a few images from the project here, but for now the only other pictures online are the tearsheets from ’2012′ which you can see on the clips section of mattlutton.com.

I also spent a total of four months in the United States, and was able to finally visit the area of the former Republic of Serbian Krajina in Croatia to document the remnants of Serbian life there. I was invited to be on the jury of the Organ Vida international photography festival in Zagreb, and was a speaker and juror at the “Foton” Makarska Photo Days Festival.

The biggest news of the year for me though was the Burn Magazine Emerging Photographer Fund Grant, which I received in June for my project “Only Unity”: Serbia In The Aftermath of Yugoslavia.

The response to the project has been very exciting, and I’m eager to finish the work this year. If you would like to know more, have a look at one of the interviews I did last year following the announcement: “Award-Winning Project Documents a Fractured Serbia” with Pete Brook at Wired’s Raw File blog, “Picture Story: Holding up a Mirror to Serbian Nationalism” in PDN Magazine (subscribers only unfortunately, see what it looked like in print here), and my chat with fellow EPF-finalist and friend Ian Willms on “BOREAL Spotlight: Matt Lutton, “Only Unity””.

You can have a look at my previous year-end posts on Dvafoto: 2009, 2010 and 2011. If you’d like more regular updates about my work, feel free to sign up for my occasional newsletter.

Thanks again everyone for continuing to follow Dvafoto and supporting all of the photographers we feature here. I wish you all a fun and successful 2013!

“Stories have always been a large part of what Hipstamatic is about. We have an opportunity to let photographers do the stories they want to tell, so we will be giving out grants to these photographers, so they don’t have to find publishers to finance their work.” -Lucas Allen Buick, CEO of Hipstamatic publisher Synthetic, speaking to BJP

This is an exciting development. Hipstamatic, the photo filter app for iPhones (iTunes store link), has announced plans to offer grants in support of photojournalism. We’ve written about the use of Hipstamatic and other iPhone filter apps in photojournalism before. There’ve been a few significant bodies of photojournalistic work produced on the iPhone: Damon Winter’s A Grunt’s Life, Michael Christopher Brown’s work from Libya, parts of the Basetrack project, VII’s iSee exhibition, and Ben Lowy’s iLibya and work from Afghanistan, among others.

There are scant details on how these photojournalism grants will work, but as BJP reports, they could be monthly or quarterly and will involve an application and judging process. The grants will be managed through the Hipstamatic Foundation, an educational arm of the company designed to support photographic storytelling.

Ben Lowy, incidentally, has been posting iPhone images frequently on his tumblr, including recent work from Libya produced on a grant from the Magnum Foundation, and he’s involved at some level with the forthcoming Hipstamatic photojournalism grants. Lowy has entered a partnership of sorts with Hipstamatic to release a Ben Lowy Lens, which will be sold under the company’s GoodPak program to provide funding for the photojournalism grants.

Make sure to check out Tumblr’s storyboard blog for an interview with Lowy about his current iPhone work. They’ll be publishing his Libya photos daily over the next week.

By the way, if you click through our links to buy anything here, we get a small cut of the sale. It’s a way for us to keep the lights on here at dvafoto. Thanks to those of you who have clicked through us in the past!

I couldn’t be more ecstatic and proud to congratulate Matt, the other half of dvafoto, on winning the Burn Magazine 2012 Emerging Photographer Fund award for his long-term project Only Unity: Serbia in the Aftermath of Yugoslavia. Announced in a video presentation at Look3 and online at Burn, Matt’s piece was chosen out of over 1,000 entries by an all-star jury: photojournalist Stephen Dupont, National Geographic Senior Photo Editor Sarah Leen, National Geographic Creative Director Bill Marr, photographer Rebecca Norris Webb, LaFabrica Madrid editor Arianna Rinaldo, and Magnum photographer Alex Webb. The video isn’t embeddable, so click here or on the modified screenshot above to watch the whole presentation.

I’ve had the pleasure of watching this essay grow from the beginning and helped with a few edits over the years. The early fits and starts (some of which you might have seen when this blog was nothing more than a cooperative photoblog) gave way to a century-spanning examination of Serbian identity. As the years went by, disconnected images found place in this narrative and Matt found his voice. It’s a powerful piece, and I know he’s got bigger plans for the work. In the meantime, we’ll have a discussion here on this blog about what went into this project and what it tells us. For now, we’ll have this public congratulations and a hearty “Huzzah!” for Matt. If you see him in Belgrade (or in the US this summer) be sure to give him a knowing nod and buy him a drink. And stay tuned for more.

Congratulations also to the other finalists and runners-up in the contest this year. The 10 essays shown in the video at Burn are stellar, and each deserving of their recognition here. The finalists were: Ian Willms, Gustavo Jononovich, Ayman Oghanna, Laia Abril, Danny Wilcox Frazier, Bieke Depoorter, and Anastasia Taylor-Lind. The two runners-up were: Simona Ghizzoni and Giovanni Cocco.

Students, there is no reason not to enter Luceo’s Student Project Award. There’s no fee, there’s a cash prize, if you win you get mentorship from a member of Luceo, and the judges are top notch. Luceo is an organization that puts its money where its mouth is. I know this firsthand. You owe it to yourself to apply for this prize.

And you don’t have much time left. The deadline is 11:59pm EST on May 15, 2011. Submission information is available on the Luceo site.

Pause in our normal programming for a bit of an update on what I have been up to here in the Balkans. Lots has been going on and it seems like it will be continuing through the summer. And Scott and I have plenty of interesting things planned for dvafoto so keep tuned.

My long-term project about the relocation of Belgrade Roma “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere” is currently featured in Lens Culture magazine. This project was also shortlisted by Anthropographia and was included in the exhibition at the New York Photography Festival and will continue to tour worldwide (a cool picture of the exhibition, snapped by a NY friend, is in the gallery above).

I’ve also published “Chapter Two” of this project on my Photoshelter Archive and included some images in the gallery above, so you can catch up on the project since my last post about the project on dva. I am continuing to photograph this story, following the families of the Gazela camp as they resettle around Serbia following the destruction of their community.

Lastly, thanks to friend Pete Brook at Prison Photography for writing about my work on this project in a post titled The Roma People: Matt Lutton building upon a legacy of wandering photographers.

I also have published on my archive a new gallery of work from Bosnia in an ongoing project called “This Time Tomorrow”. I will be following events in Bosnia closely as political and economic stagnation continues to slowly suffocate the country. Some tectonic shift will and must come to solve one of the world’s most entrenched political crises. Maybe tomorrow, but probably not.

I am currently focused on completing my book about Serbia in the aftermath of the Milosevic decade, titled “Only Unity”. My project was recently announced as one of seven nominees for the POYi Emerging Vision Incentive, a $10,000 grant for an emerging photographer. See some of the work and my (full) proposal at the POYi website. Congrats to the winner of the grant, James Chance and the other nominees.

I am also announcing for the first time publicly the existence of an tumblr sketchbook for this project: onlyunity.tumblr.com. Have a look if you want to follow me feel my way through this work. The latest news is that I’ve finished the first book dummy, which will serve as my university thesis, enabling me to finally graduate this year.

It has been a busy couple of months with a few interesting assignments, taking me from Budapest on a corporate job to a British international school in Belgrade for a UK newspaper. There is much to come this summer, including a trip to a Serbian winery connected to the royal family and projects to be featured in well known online publications. And of course focus on Dvafoto. I look forward to sharing this all soon, and I hope you are enjoying your summer (or winter, if you happen to be south of the equator).

I just got word of a new series of grants put together by the Magnum Foundation, which is the non-profit arm of Magnum Photos. They sponsor programs previously noted: the Emerging Photographer Grant, the Inge Morath award and the Young Photographer in the Caucasus award. The new program is called the Emergency Fund, and their press release really says it best so I’m including it here. I’ll just say that this is very exciting news, terrific for Magnum and all the photographers awarded!

From Magnum Foundation:

NEW YORK, NY – The Magnum Foundation has committed more than $100,000 to support experienced photographers working to document critical issues that have been overlooked or underrepresented by mainstream media.

The 2010 Emergency Fund photographers will tackle issues of local, national, or global concern, with preference given to projects carried out in anticipation of, rather than in response to, a crisis. Selected projects include an examination of homelessness on the streets of Dhaka, Bangladesh; an in-depth look at coming of age amidst the HIV epidemic in Swaziland; and a non-embedded perspective on the ongoing war in Afghanistan.

The 2010 Emergency Fund Photographers are: Christopher Anderson; Jonas Bendiksen; Cedric Gerbehaye; Bruce Gilden; Saiful Huq Omi; Sohrab Hura; Krisanne Johnson; Alex Majoli; Karen Mirzoyan; Dominic Nahr; Simon Norfolk; Louie Palu; Paolo Pellegrin; Gilles Peress; Eugene Richards; Larry Towell; Shehab Uddin; Geert van Kesteren; Kadir van Lohuizen; and Wang Yishu.

Other projects explore intertribal relations in Kenya, foreclosures in America, and climate change in Asia. In addition to the 16 projects the Foundation has committed to funding, it maintains a roster of photographers to address situations as they arise.

The Magnum Foundation was created to sustain the field of independent documentary photography for a new generation of photographers. The Emergency Fund supports photographers to produce independent projects and to partner with advocacy, human rights, and humanitarian organizations to engage targeted audiences and reach a broad public. The photographers are represented by a wide variety of agencies that distribute their work through editorial and other channels.

A group of 10 photography professionals nominated 100 photographers to submit proposals. The recipients were selected—based on the strength of their work and the importance of the issues they proposed to address—by an independent Editorial Board comprised of: Bob Dannin, former editorial director of Magnum Photos and professor of history at Suffolk University; renowned author Philip Gourevitch; Marc Kusnetz, former senior producer for NBC News and consultant for Human Rights First; Susan Meiselas, photographer and president of the Magnum Foundation; and Amy Yenkin, director of the Documentary Photography Project at the Open Society Institute.

We’ve linked quite a few times to pieces written by photographer Asim Rafiqui, who posts regularly on his indispensable blog The Spinning Head. We unfortunately haven’t posted much about his work though. So when he wrote me this week with the great news that his project The Idea of India, which previously was awarded the Aftermath Project grant in 2009 and received Blue Earth Alliance support the same year, was just honored with a Fulbright Scholarship, I had to share here. Rafiqui will be based for a year in New Delhi, India with this support and will continue to produce new chapters for his ever expanding project. I went through a few of the essays and pulled out some of my favorite images. These pictures show the intensely rich and unsentimental texture of a nation so often photographed in cliche. I think this is a beautiful accomplishment and the essence of what makes this project and Rafiqui special.

It is great and inspiring to see interesting and important projects getting the support they deserve. And it is at least one good sign that there are photographers and supporters (grants, programs, publications) out there willing to develop long term and less-than-obvious projects. One of the first pieces I read by Rafiqui that set me off into thought was his series “What Ails Photojournalism”, which I wrote about here on Dva in March 2009 in the post What Ails Us. Rafiqui is putting his time and energy where his mouth is, and is proving that there are some outlets, however hard to track down and gain the support of, for big idea and revolutionary projects. And thats terrific, I hope we see more.

Two collectives are putting their money where their mouths are and supporting new journalism. It’s great to see this kind of effort and monetary support rising up from within the ranks of photographers.

Luceo Images’ Student Project Award is due real soon, but you still have time to submit. From the call for entries: “Central to LUCEO’s mission is our belief in the importance of long-term projects. We also understand that developing photographers need support. To advance both of these causes, LUCEO has created the Luceo Student Project Award, which will be disbursed annually to a talented student photographer in support of a significant and developing body of work.” One winner will receive $1000 to pursue the project as well as direct mentorship from one member of Luceo Images.

MJR’s film grant aims to support film-based projects, and will grant $500 to one photographer. More than that, the group wants “to start a conversation. This is where the information/drinks evening, portfolio reviews and the winner’s event come into play – it’s all an opportunity for us to get to know you and for you to get to know the wider photographic community.”

I know many photographers worry that their work isn’t good enough to win these sorts of competitions, but the only sure way not to win is not to enter. You lose nothing by entering, and gain valuable experience of editing a story or portfolio. If you’re even halfway thinking about entering, do it!

Be sure to check out more calls for entry on our photo calendar.

The Aftermath Project is working on publishing it’s next book, War is Only Half the Story, vol. 3, and the organization needs your help. Each print run costs about USD$20,000. Now, you can buy a print (warning: pdf link) to help fund the publication of the next volume. Prints are available from Ami Vitale, Davide Monteleone, Rodrigo Abd, Saiful Huq Omi, Donald Weber, Asim Rafiqui, Louie Palu, Andrea Bruce, and Sara Terry. The prints aren’t cheap, starting at $400, but they’re beautiful and help support the funding of future long-form journalism. The book is an interesting project, as well. The new volume will feature the work of the 2009 Aftermath project winners and finalists. Sarah Terry, director/founder of Aftermath, describes the book in more detail:

Our annual book is a central part of the Aftermath Project’s mission to help educate the public about the true cost of war and the real price of peace. It is distributed free to a broad audience, including every US senator; journalism and peacebuilding programs; and museum curators around the world. It is also available on our website, www.theaftermathproject.org.

(via Donald Weber)

There are quite a few big deadlines this weekend on our photocalendar. Some are free, others have entry fees…

Our monthly posting of dvafoto’s deadline calendar. The calendar can be accessed in a web browser, or with ical or xml applications. If you know of any upcoming deadlines not on the list, please send them to deadlines@dvafoto.com or use the submissions page.