The Ian Parry Scholarship is an international photographic competition for young photographers who are either attending a full-time photographic course or are under 24. Entrants must submit a portfolio and a brief synopsis of a project they would undertake if they won the scholarship. The prize consists of £3,500 towards their chosen assignment £500 to [ … ]

The annual Inge Morath Award is a $5000 prize given to a woman photographer under thirty years of age to assist in the completion of a long term documentary project.

The IAFOR Documentary Photography Award promotes and assists in the professional development of emerging documentary photographers and photojournalists. The contest is free to enter and the £1000 award is judged by a panel of leading professionals in documentary photography and photojournalism.

The International Women’s Media Foundation will award $2.3 million to women journalists over the next 10 years through a gift from the Howard G. Buffett Foundation that seeks to empower women around the world working in the media.

For over sixty years, John Gutmann made an imprint as an artist and educator on the development of photography as an art form. Through his philanthropic generosity, annual awards of up to $5,000 are made to emerging photographers showing professional accomplishment, serious artistic commitment, and need in the field of photography. Candidates for Gutmann Fellowships [ … ]

The Leica Oskar Barnack Award is for professional photographers whose unerring powers of observation capture and express the relationship between man and the environment in the most graphic form. The winner of the “Leica Oskar Barnack Award” receives a Leica M camera and a lens worth 10,000 Euros in addition to a cash prize of [ … ]

Each year Light Work invites 12-15 artists to participate in its residency program, including one artist co-sponsored by Autograph ABP and one artist in conjunction with the Urban Video Project (UVP). Artists selected for the residency program are invited to live in Syracuse for one month. They receive a $5,000 stipend, an apartment to stay [ … ]

The Lucie Foundation Emerging Scholarship provides a grant of $2,500 for an emerging or student photographer, working on a portfolio or specific body of work.

The Manuel Rivera-Ortiz Foundation calls for project proposals along with portfolios to highlight human unrest, forgotten communities, over-exploited people and environments impacted by war, poverty, famine, disease, exploitation and global distress. The foundation will award a $5,000 grant to the winning documentary/reporting project proposal.

Nikon has an incredible opportunity and I am honored to have been a judge. The Nikon Photo Contest nurtures an aspirational community that supports photographers who wish to share important stories and influence the way people think through photography. Get your entries ready and watch the Nikon Photo Contest website for more information about this [ … ]

The National Press Photographers Foundation scholarships are awarded to encourage those with the talent and dedication to photojournalism and who need financial help to continue their studies. These awards are directed toward those studying full-time or returning to college.

The National Press Photographers Association is supporting the community photo story through the NPPA Short Grants, with six awards of $6,000 each. A project funded by a short grant should be small in scale and focused. Staff photographers are encouraged to apply and complete the project during furlough, vacation or comp time. Independent photographers are [ … ]

The Open Society Fellowship supports individuals pursuing innovative and unconventional approaches to fundamental open society challenges to enrich public understanding of those challenges and stimulate far-reaching and probing conversations within the Open Society Foundations and in the world.

The Open Society Documentary Photography Project offers grants for documentary photographers from Central Asia, the South Caucasus, Afghanistan, Mongolia, and Pakistan. The fund awards approximately ten cash stipends in the amount of $3,500 USD each to photographers to produce a photo essay on a critical human rights or social issue in the region. Along with [ … ]

The Photographic Museum of Humanity Grant is an international contest with the aim to finance talented photographers and discover new talents. A total of $4,000 will be awarded.

The Photocrati Fund offers a $5,000 grant to a photographer to undertake an important humanitarian and environmental photography project. Our goal is to identify outstanding photographers and to provide the resources necessary to pursue projects that will have a tangible and positive effect on the world.

The PhotoPhilanthropy Activist Awards identify outstanding work done by photographers in collaboration with nonprofit organizations worldwide, with prizes ranging from $2,000-$15,000. The application period begins in October.

The Soros Justice Fellowships Program’s Media Fellowships is for individuals with distinctive voices proposing to complete media projects that engage and inform, spur debate and conversation, and catalyze change on important U.S. criminal justice issues. Deadline is in October. Watch the Open Society website for the next round.

The Rory Peck Training Fund makes hostile environment training affordable for freelancers. Since its launch in 2000, the Fund has given over 500 bursaries to freelance journalists, photographers, cameramen and filmmakers, enabling them to gain the vital skills and knowledge needed for work in hostile environments. The Trust works with five approved course providers. You [ … ]

Rory Peck Trust offers individual grants to freelance newsgatherers and/or their families who find themselves in a critical situation. This includes freelancers who have been threatened, imprisoned or injured, forced into hiding or exile, or killed.

The Tim Hetherington Grant is an annual grant awarded to a photographer to finalize a project on a human rights theme. It is open to professional photographers who have participated in a recent World Press Photo Contest. Applications are accepted in October every year.

I am thrilled to be starting my first crowd funding campaign with the new site, IndieVoices and I’m incredibly grateful to The Photo Society, for selecting it to be among the first that they launch. The New York Times ran an interview about this project. Read more about it here. This is an important story I began with The [ … ]

The Alexia grant is a phenomenal award that provides grants and scholarships to photojournalists, enabling them to create work that gives voice to those who go unheard, fosters cultural understanding and exposes social injustice. In 2000, this grant changed my life when I won the professional grant. I was young and inexperienced and it allowed me [ … ]

MediaStorm  created a beautiful film about my work with Ripple Effect Images. Our aim is to tell the stories that empower women around the world. Watch it HERE.   For photographer Ami Vitale, the pivotal moment occurred in Guinea-Bissau.   It was the start of her career and she was visiting her sister in the Peace Corp. Vitale expected Africa [ … ]

Aspiring photographers often ask me where they might go to find the best stories. My answer is always the same – get to know your own backyard, what’s close at hand, rather than traveling around the world just to capture images of something foreign or exotic.  My rationale is that if you can tell these [ … ]

Check out this month’s issue of AFAR travel magazine and the story “COFFEELAND” by writer David Farley. This was an epic journey across Ethiopia tracing the origination of coffee that goes back to the thirteenth century. Legend says that a herder named Kaldi noticed his goats “dancing” after nibbling bright red berries. Kaldi brought the [ … ]

The cameras have been turned and I’m on a new National Geographic Channel tv show called “Mission Covershot” shot in Sri Lanka!  The show captures the journey of eight photographers as they compete to get the perfect covershot  and the chance of having their photo on the cover of National Geographic magazine. I had the pleasure of being [ … ]

Join renowned photojournalist Ami Vitale for an enlightening photography workshop on the island nation of Sri Lanka. She just finished a ten part TV series with National Geographic Channel that is currently airing in Asia. This summer she will lead a small and intimate workshop to “The Pearl of the Indian Ocean” with its abundant wildlife and [ … ]

New IMAGES HERE:More and more, people want to know where their steak comes from and how it was raised.  Spurred by growing concern over beef’s environmental impact and the long-term viability of their livelihood, a cohort of Montana ranchers is working to integrate ecological practices into livestock management. Over the last year, I’ve been spending time with ranchers [ … ]

National Geographic has posted our story on the Dene First Nation people HERE. The ancestral home of the Dene First Nation people is a landscape of unfathomable vastness. 52,000 square kilometers span this region, south of the artic circle, along the Nanuvet and Northwest Territories of Canada. The place is replete with musk ox, grizzly bear, [ … ]

I had the privilege to work on a book and exhibit project in Cappadocia, Turkey. It’s rare to have these kinds of opportunities, especially in today’s climate. I am grateful to Zaman for commissioning us, Selahattin Sevi who edited the project and photographer Kürşat Bayhan patiently guided me through Cappadocia. The book is gorgeous! Twenty-four of my [ … ]

See the full interview here: http://proofmsj.com/photojournalists/ Few can boast credentials such as this: seventy five plus countries covering civil unrest, poverty, violent conflict and social injustice; photographs exhibited all over the world and published in National Geographic, Adventure, Geo, Newsweek, Time, Smithsonian amongst other international magazines and news sources; global recognition including the Photographer of the [ … ]

I’m off for the Thelon, close the the Arctic circle with a group of indigenous children from the Dene’ tribe and will be incommunicado except for a blog we will have on The Nature Conservancy website called Cool Green Science—check it out. blog.nature.org Naturally, I’m very excited for this epic adventure. For three weeks, we [ … ]

I was in Bangladesh telling the story of how this country is on the frontlines of climate change. I have a feature length documentary coming out soon, but here is a short I did for Oxfam about how one village is being impacted by the changing weather and what they are doing to adapt. The [ … ]

I’m looking forward to teaching a multimedia workshop at the Santa Fe workshops from February 17-23, 2013.   This week long workshop will be intense and challenging but  ultimately very rewarding. I will be exploring  how to make the jump from stills to video and will focus on helping the students tell more compelling visual stories [ … ]

These are just the first few minutes of the documentary on my work in Madagascar. It will be available in full length as an app in the Apple appstore in July 2011. Over the Islands of Africa — Madagascar The sounds of their names alone conjure up thoughts of pristine beaches, spices and the tales [ … ]

Nikon recently interviewed me for their Nikon Professional Services blog. Here is an excerpt. Traveling the world and moving from one locale to the next, “clicking” pictures of beautiful places and lovely people. You may ask yourself: “How hard can it be?” Let me tell you from experience: it’s a tough job if you are [ … ]

Documenting West African country of Guinea Bissau

With the events unfolding across the Middle East, the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma contacted myself and several other journalists who have worked in conflict zones to better understand what you can do to cover volatile street protests without getting injured. Here are my comments and please look at this link to see some [ … ]

The medium I work in is changing and video is now playing a much bigger role in what we do. Cameras like the one I carry can shoot hd video and it can enhance our abilities as storytellers.  This is already playing a big role in my future but I don’t think I would have [ … ]