USA –
NEW YORK, September 10, 2015 – Getty Images, the global leader in visual communication, in collaboration with Instagram, today announced the recipients of the Getty Images Instagram Grant, an inaugural grant program founded to reward photographers documenting stories from underrepresented communities around the world using Instagram.
The three recipients were selected from more than 1200 entries from photographers in 109 countries, based on their respective bodies of work on Instagram. Their work was judged by an esteemed panel of photographic experts, including National Geographic Photography Fellow David Guttenfelder, Director of Photography & Visual Enterprise for TIME Kira Pollack, documentary photographer Maggie Steber, documentary photographer Malin Fezehai, and co-founder of @EverydayIran and documentary photographer Ramin Talaie who focused on the quality of imagery, photographic technique, as well as storytelling ability. The inaugural recipients are:
– Ismail Ferdous (@afterranaplaza), a Bangladeshi documentary photographer using Instagram to cover social humanitarian issues, receives a grant for his project titled After Rana Plaza, which centers around the surviving relatives of those killed in the 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory.
– Adriana Zehbrauskas (@adrianazehbrauskas), a Brazilian-born photographer currently residing in Mexico City, has been awarded for her Instagram portfolio of work which covers topics such as climate change and the documentation of the everyday lives of Latin Americans. Adriana intends to use the grant to fund her project “Next of Kin: Family Matters”, shooting portraits of the families of 43 missing students who went missing from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers School last year. Adriana is also a contributor to the Instagram collective @everydayclimatechange.
– Dmitry Markov (@dcim.ru), resides in Pskov, Russia, and volunteers for multiple children’s charities. By sharing his work on Instagram, Dmitry hopes to spotlight the plight of orphaned children and encourage society to “look at the problems of such children in a humane way.”
“Getty Images believes in the power of imagery as a catalyst for social change,” said Elodie Mailliet Storm, Getty Images’ Senior Director of Content Partnerships. “Our three recipients could not better exemplify the original aim of this grant: to document and share stories of underrepresented communities that otherwise rarely come into focus. We are honored to award these grants and hope they will encourage talent to continue to tell important stories through new platforms.”
Each recipient will receive a grant of US $10,000 and mentorship from one of Getty Images’ award-winning photojournalists, who include: John Moore Chris McGrath and Andrew Burton. In addition, recipients’ work will be exhibited at Photoville, the largest annual photographic event in New York City, which opens today and runs through to September 20, 2015.
