Just a news brief with a few minutes of internet while traveling through Bosnia: Alessandra Sanguinetti Wins National Geographic Magazine Grant for a project about food production.

I had the pleasure of seeing her speak about her work as part of a Magnum workshop last year and was utterly enchanted. She has a beautiful, unique voice in documentary pictures right now and I hope you take some time to look through (and think) about her work. I was very confused when I first saw the pictures but came around when I thought about the message, the truthful beauty in her pictures. I can’t wait (just like Jonas Bendiksen last year, and Eugene Richards the year before that) to see the pictures that are made from this grant.

(h/t PDN’s Twitter feed)

Brian Ulrich can’t believe he’s alive because he’s just been named a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow. Other photographers awarded the fellowship this year, most previously unknown to me: Thomas Joshua Cooper (examples), Osamu James Nakagawa, Suzanne Opton (you may have seen her Soldier Billboard Project), Anna Shteynshleyger, Cheryle St. Onge, and Byron Glen Wolfe (can’t find anything online for Wolfe… update: link found thanks to Tom in the comments).

Brian Ulrich has long been a favorite of mine. His work documenting retail stores, thrift stores, and store backrooms, explains the current American economy (starting about when George W. Bush told the American public that the most patriotic thing they could do after Sept. 11 was to go shopping) better than any photojournalism I’ve seen. Ulrich’s recent essay on closed stores in the suburbs for Time left me a little wanting (except for a picture or two), but the rest of his work is top notch, for sure.