Hipstamatic

“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!

In recent months the Alexia Foundation has been very busy with new social media presence and a gorgeous new website that shows off all of the terrific projects and photographers they have supported over the last 21 years. The Foundation was founded in 1991 and has awarded $700,000 in grants to fund over 128 projects by both professionals and students.

This year’s winners include Justin Maxon’s When the Spirit Moves, Kathryn Cook’s Memory of Trees and Katie Orlinsky’s Innocence Assassinated: Living in Mexico’s Drug War. Past winners include Matt Eich (2008), Balazs Gardi (2006), Marcus Bleasdale (2005), Francesco Zizola (2004), Ami Vitale (2000) and Melissa Lyttle (1999).

The Foundation has also just announced a new $25,000 grant called the Women’s Initiative “to provide resources for a photojournalist to produce a project that illuminates any form of abuse of women in the United States but with global significance.” The deadline is August 15, 2012.

“The Alexia Foundation’s main purpose is to encourage and help photojournalists create stories that drive change. While our traditional grant guidelines put no limits on the subject matter for grant proposals, a few proposals about women’s rights in the last few years have been so powerful that they have compelled the Foundation to create a grant specifically on the issue of women’s abuse. Because this issue is so shocking and deplorable – but continues partly because it is so often unseen or ignored – the Foundation will provide a $25,000 grant so a project can be produced that will illuminate the horrors of what is happening, often invisibly in our own communities.”

If you aren’t familiar, let me introduce you to our dvafoto calendar which lists upcoming deadlines for photography contests, grants and events. We rely on submissions for most of the upcoming deadlines, so if you come across something that you think should be added to our calendar, please send us a tip at submissions@dvafoto.com

It is an interesting time of the year for grants and contests, and I wanted to point out a couple of deadlines that are soon approaching that I’m personally keeping an eye on:

Saturday October 22: The Terry O’Neill Tag Award is due, with categories focused on Fine Art/ Reportage / Fashion / Documentary / Landscape / Wildlife / Portraiture.

Tuesday November 1: the important Aftermath Project Grant is due on Nov 1 and Shots Magazine is interested in submissions for their Portfolio Issue on the same day.

Friday November 4: 2012 Call for Fellowships from Houston Center of Photography which offers to the chosen fellows a proper show and some financing to produce your exhibition. We have friends who have won this accolade and have made wonderful use of the resources at HCP.

For more recommendations about upcoming contests stay in touch over this busy fall.

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.

This resource is especially useful this time of year, when there are a lot of new grants with new procedures and deadlines emerging every day. and please do pass on the news if you hear about contests or organizations with upcoming deadlines that we should add to the dvafoto calendar.
Submissions and reminders are always welcome.

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.

I know plenty of people are following our dvafoto Deadline Calendar, which you can always find on the right-hand column on our site. I just wanted to send out a reminder that a number of popular grants and contests are coming due, because they definitely caught me off guard.

Lutton's dining room table in Seattle, 2007

Also two big European awards from manufacturers are due now: the Linhof Young Photographer Award has a postmark date of Tuesday March 31 and the Hasselblad Masters Awards (with a handy ‘up and coming’ category) has an online submission due Wednesday April 1. All of these have free entry.

Lastly Hey Hot Shot’s next entry period is due May 1st, online submission for $60.

So finish your edits. There are more prizes down the line, be sure to keep your eyes on the calendar which we’ll update when we can with the prizes and grants that we’re interested in. Feel free to email us suggestions for things we’re missing and we’ll work on sharing them too.

UPDATE: Since posting this earlier I’ve found a few more things that are happening this week: Px3: Prix de la Photographie Paris has apparently extended their deadline until Tuesday March 31, with student and pro categories. Also you can submit for exhibitions at two major photojournalism festivals: Visa Pour L’Image is due Friday April 3 and The Noorderlicht International Photofestival has submissions due Saturday April 4. Good luck!

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.

I’ve been trying to put something more substantive together today but I’m just a little too under the gun with my Aftermath Project proposal being due soon and an out of town assignment this weekend for the Fader … so here is a quick roundup of things I’ve been reading and been interested in the last few days, all of which probably deserve a larger post themselves. As a side note: I have GOT to cut down on my RSS intake … you’ll see from the mess of sources I’m giving you today… (Pictures are from my trip to Wenatchee earlier this month)

First, some great great music for you to put on while chewing through all the tribulations of the week. The Elephant Six Collective, which produced such great bands as Neutral Milk Hotel and Olivia Tremor Control, and now well-known groups The Apples in Stereo and Of Montreal, is out doing a ‘Holiday Surprise Tour’ around the country. One of the big surprises is that the elusive Jeff Mangum, leader of Neutral Milk Hotel, has shown up and played with his friends. Go here for a full two and a half hour concert: Elephant Six Orchestra on All Songs Considered. (All Songs Considered is rad, if you don’t know it, and they have a great podcast feed). Also, a youtube clip of “Glue” by The Gerbils (!!) performed at SUNY Purchase.

In a great roundup of all the craziness going on around the industry (magazines closing, scaling back, people losing jobs) Whats the Jackanory! tells us to keep our chins up. I’ll try man, I’ll try.

Highway 2, Washington State.

I might be the last photographer to have started following Jörg Colberg on his great blog Conscientious, but I’ve been enjoying it recently. He is making a thought-provoking push for us to reexamine the visual language of photojournalism. And is giving examples here. (Plus today, What is photojournalism anyways?, a brilliant question). I’m very conflicted, and this deserves a lot of thought and consideration and many of its own blog posts. Not least of which is I love the work as it is, it means a lot to me, and that Majoli picture he points to is from a project/book (Leros) that is very important to me and what I know as great work.
You should chime in yourself with some of the discussions going on: Lightstalkers has a thread titled ‘Well someone had to say it sooner or later’ and Alec Soth baits us with “Does photojournalism make you verklempt?” on the Magnum Blog.

On Drinking With A Dead Man John Loomis gives us a nice rundown of where he sources his mailers and portfolio materials in another nice behind-the-scenes business post.

Digital Railroad continues its superheated implosion with news coming from all over the place… I recommend reading the top of Lightstalkers message board for all of the latest. Frankly, whatever I post right now will be old news by time you read it.. this is a fast-moving story. (Newest I have is that web-portfolio house Livebooks, who does my website for example, is also getting in on the fallout and offering deals to switch over from DRR (reports PDN)).

Ladder in Orchard near Leavenworth, WA

Part of my insanity over my rss-load is coming from my new subscription to insanely productive blogger Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish at The Atlantic. That link is to an angry post that he did about Palin’s medical records; he also provided me with this gem of a link to a blogging 80something woman. Called ‘What was I thinking when I called Sarah Palin a Bitch’. Sullivan came recommended to me by editor of Slate.com David Plotz, through their Gabfest.

I’ve been pretty disappointed with most of the work coming out of Magnum|Insight over the past week, I must admit, but there are some interesting things. Particularly Alessandra Sanguinetti’s work from Los Angeles and, more for the story than pictures, Mikhail Subotzky’s Between Rome and New York.

On the other hand, this is a must see: photographer Alan Chin at McCain/Palin Rally over at BAGNewsnotes. This is a smart photographer, on a very smart blog. (I wrote about him earlier, here).

In other pictures, you really really must also check out Vanessa Winship and her work from the Balkans and Black Sea. More info to come, but we hope to interview Winship soon here on DVA….

Related, take a look at this trove of great videos of lectures/projections over at Lumix Festival for Young Photojournalism in Hanover, Germany. I found it searching for Vanessa Winship, but it also includes (maybe not all in English) presentations by Thomas Höpker, Steve McCurry, Antonin Kratochvil, Thomas Dworzak (can’t wait to find the time to watch this one especially), Heidi und Hans-Jürgen Koch and Kai Wiedenhöfer.

Got some more bad news the other day: the National Geographic Society has suspended all grants for the rest of the year, “in efforts to cope with the current economic situation.” I have been in the running for a Young Explorers Grant for my as-yet-publicly-announced Russia project. Maybe in the Spring.. bummer.

I’ve known Jehad Nga’s work for awhile now, and saw some of his pictures at his exhibition at Bonni Benrubi (and direct link), with Paolo Pellegrin, early this summer. But I was alerted to a new story he has done about Somali Pirates called “Pirates, Inc”. (note: unfortunately it is impossible to link directly to his stories on his site, so click on ‘From Here on In-Galleries’ and choose the title of the story). Terrific work, on a story that I’ve been thinking about a little bit. Best of luck to him too at the World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass going on soon in Amsterdam. You can see his essay for that on his site too, My Shadow, My Opponent, about boxers in the Kibera slum of Nairobi. Such great color…

Last, in breaking music news, Zach Condon, better known for his group Beirut, will be releasing new music soon, including some surprises (electronic music??). Read this interview over at Pitchfork.

If you’d like more pictures from me, have a look over at the updated ‘Recent Work’ section of my website — www.mattlutton.com.

Picking Fuji Apples, for the Korean Market, at Phillippi Fruit Company in Wenatchee, WA

Endnote: as you can probably see I ended up taking some hours to put this post together … what started as a cop out of an actual post became my procrastination tool. Damn.

Via Mary Virginia Swanson’s excellent blog, I learned that it’s currently Funding Month at the Foundation Center, an organization started in 1956 in order to get artists funding through grants.

The organization has offices in New York, Atlanta, Cleveland, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., and so-called Cooperating Collections, which are grant-related resources, in all 50 American states.

If you’re one of the few who has yet to see James Nachtwey’s latest project, documenting the fight against and the effects of extreme drug resistant tuberculosis, get to http://www.xdrtb.org/ right now. The photos are powerful, as expected, the subject is under-reported, and there is a solution to this problem. Thousands and thousands are dying and a cure exists, but the lack of available care is actually making the scourge worse. Wise use of his TED prize money, awarded in 2007 alongside Bill Clinton and EO Wilson to grant a wish to change the world. One item of particular note is that the execution of the story was not dependent on traditional media publishing models. Now, magazines and newspapers serve as a sort of PR machine for public awareness of the project. This might work in this case, but only so many stories (of countless worthwhile stories) will ever receive the sort of financial and institutional support required for a project of this magnitude. This project is fantastic and worthy of its accolades, but it’s disheartening to realize that it exists, in no small way, because the media failed to notice and report the growing crisis.

Update (by Matt): The Boston Globe’s The Big Picture blog has their trademark big photos from this project, check it out (h/t PDNPulse)