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.

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.

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Stepan Rudik - World Press Photo 2010 - disqualified 3rd place Sports Feature

Stepan Rudik - World Press Photo 2010 - disqualified 3rd place Sports Feature - offending image

Stepan Rudik - Original crop

Stepan Rudik - Original File

“After careful consideration, we found it imperative to disqualify the photographer from the contest. The principle of World Press Photo is to promote high standards in photojournalism. Therefore, we must maintain the integrity of our organization even when the outcome is regrettable.” -Michiel Munneke, managing director of World Press Photo

Lens, PetaPixel, and BJP all have good coverage of the latest photo manipulation scandal in photojournalism: World Press Photo has disqualified Stepan Rudik, 3rd place Sports Features in the 2010 contest, for an ethics violation. Rudik removed an element of a picture (see the slideshow above) in violation of World Press Photo contest regulations against image alteration, specifically this rule: “The content of the image must not be altered. Only retouching which conforms to the currently accepted standards in the industry is allowed.” The object seems to stem from the removal of a person’s foot from the background of the picture, which Rudik defended to the BJP, saying, “the photograph I submitted to the contest is a crop, and the retouched detail is the foot of a man which appears on the original photograph, but who is not a subject of the image submitted to the contest.”

I’ve got to echo Asim Rafiqui: What a laughable extreme crop and toning job. Color and tilt correction in photoshop is one thing, moody vignetting in photoshop is another, but this is a whole new level of turning a crap photo into something entirely different. Wow. This, rather than the offending foot, is the bigger problem for the credibility of photojournalism.

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.

Citing difficulty experienced by those trying to upload their entries, Worldpress Photo has extended the 2010 contest deadline to Jan. 17.

Our calendar has been updated.

Also, in speaking with others, it seems like twitter would be a natural way to keep people informed about deadlines. We’ve begun using the #photocalendar hashtag (rss for #photocalendar)

We’re going to start posting our deadline calendar on a monthly basis in the interest of making it more visible. 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.

Tomasz Tomaszewski - Hades - SocialDocumentary.net Winner

SocialDocumentary.net has announced the winners in the site’s “Documenting the Global Recession” contest. Tomasz Tomaszewski’s story “Hades?,” a story documenting widespread loss of industry and jobs in Poland, took the top prize with honorable mentions going to Khaled Hasan, Michael McElroy, and Shiho Fukada, and the People’s Choice awards going to Matt Eich and David Wells. Lots of great work to see behind those links, but I’m especially interested in the contest being used as a way to generate interest in work addressing the economy. We’ve written previously about tired images of financial crises and the difficulty of photographing something as nebulous and abstract as a recession related to complex financial derivatives. These stories recognized in SocialDocumentary.net’s contest humanize complicated international financial issues from a deeply engaged and emotional perspective. Definitely worth a look.

Just got recent word that two photocontests that were to be closing on December 1st have been extended to Monday December 7th.

Socialdocumentary.net’s “Crisis & Opportunity: Documenting the Global Recession” ($35 entry for a series)

The 2010 Anthropographia Award for Human Rights and Photography (Multimedia and stills, $30/series)

As always you can visit Dvafoto’s Deadline Calendar for a roundup of upcoming deadlines on grants and awards. (It is also available as a rss feed and is able to be synced with your own calendar software, but I can’t figure out how to link those here. It is also listed on the bottom of our sidebar over on the right–> Update by Scott: And it’s at the top of this post.). I have a few more listings to add this evening that have come across my radar recently, so check back later. Feel free to send Scott or I your suggestions on items to add to the list if you come across something worthy that we haven’t put up. Happy editing!

The Atlanta Photojournalism Contest deadline has been pushed back to Friday, Nov. 20, 2009 at 11:55pm US Eastern time.

[I held off on posting this, thinking we wouldn't be adding much to the discussion...but after a week or so, there still hasn't been much mention of organizations working to change the demographics of the photography industry]

There are a lot of white faces at all levels in the photography industry: in the editorial offices, in the business offices, behind the cameras, and in front of the cameras (well, in photojournalism it’s often dark suffering faces in front of the cameras, but that’s another conversation; rarely do black models feature prominently in fashion magazines, for instance.). What started as an observation at Reciprocity Failure turned into an incendiary accusation and “contest” at Duckrabbit and then blossomed into a conversation in the photography blog echo chamber. Prison Photography, Politics, Theory & Photography, APhotoADay, Conscientious, Photo Business News & Forum, and APhotoEditor all weighed in, and I’m sure there were others. Duckrabbit’s now added more fire to the flame…. Some of the best discussion I’ve seen on the topic occurred on lightstalkers and in APhotoEditor’s comments (though APE’s discussion got a little out of hand and comments have since been closed). I was also interested to read John Edwin Mason’s perspective about the lack of diversity at the just-finished Look3 festival in Charlottesville. This is a conversation that needs to happen. Photo District News started out as the target of the accusations of passive racism, and they have responded in the PDNPulse post “On Lack of Diversity in Photography, and in PDN.”

As some have pointed out, this is a problem far more pervasive than the jury for PDN’s Photo Annual. Looking at the jury for this year’s POYi, for instance, or the names of the BOP judges, the contests are controlled, primarily by white people (update June 23: thanks to a reader for pointing out that BOP counts a few African-Americans and latinos among their judges). World Press Photo, on the other hand, boasts a remarkably diverse roster of jurors. Here, I should say that I do not mean to impugn any of these talented judges or these contests; the work they reward is often well-deserving and the lack of the diversity, I think, indicates not a pernicious white supremacist power grab, but rather a passive exclusion of people of color endemic to the European and American mass media industry. That’s still a significant hurdle, but perhaps it’s better than it could be. Also, there’s a raft of black media organizations (old list, found in a suspect comment in APhotoEditor’s discussion), and I don’t want to disparage their efforts by suggesting the western media is only white. That list, too, suggests that the majority-white media world does not fill the market need for black Americans, and one suspects it doesn’t for other minorities in the US, either. That isn’t necessarily a problem either; media perhaps shouldn’t be all things to all people, and a multiplicity of publications aimed at varied audiences begets a broader and better perspective on the world than would a few magazines aimed at “the masses.”

The simple fact is that there needs to be more diversity throughout the photo industry at all levels. Programs such as the Angkor Photography Festival’s free workshops for young Asian photographers, the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop (interview about the workshop), Aina (a nonprofit geared toward creating a well-trained independent local media in Afghanistan; interview about the workshop), the Gordon Parks Center for Culture and Diversity (their photo contest deadline is today, by the way), the Young Photographer in the Caucusus Award (deadline June 15), and minority journalism programs and professional organizations (yes, they do matter!), begin to address the need for an entry point to photography to those from different backgrounds than the middle class white males dominating the industry. Programs such as Women in Photojournalism or the Photobetty collective (sadly, now seemingly defunct) begin to address gender disparity in photography. Organizations such as Majority World exhibitions such as ICP’s Snap Judgments, and blogs such as Asian Photography Blog, begin to show the world as viewed and photographed by its many cultures. And grant competitions such as National Geographic’s All Roads Photography Program begin the process of rewarding high-caliber photography by indigenous photographers. But this is only a beginning.