Eugene Smith Fund announces 2022 Call for Entries
The W. Eugene Smith Fund is now accepting applications for its 43rd annual Grant in Humanistic Photography and will return to its tradition of awarding a single grant of $40,000. An additional $5,000 grant will be awarded as a Fellowship, and two finalists deemed worthy of special recognition will each be given a grant of $2,500. For the past two years, the Smith Fund Board of Trustees voted to award $10,000 grants to each of five entrants, a decision based on the decline in available grants, especially for the arts, and the difficulty photographers had with finding work during Covid isolation and shutdown mandates.
In 2022, The Smith Fund is accepting applications for the 5th annual Eugene Smith Student Grant ($5,000), open to all collegiate-level students, and the 26th annual Howard Chapnick Grant ($10,000), which honors an individual or organization whose services support photographers. Since the Fund’s inception in 1979, it has awarded over $1.1 million to photographers whose past work and proposed projects follow the tradition of W. Eugene Smith’s career as a photographic essayist.
The deadline for submitting applications for all grants is May 31, 2022.
“We continue to be impressed and inspired by the quality of work submitted by photographers the world over and especially during the past two years,” said Scott Thode, president of the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund, noting ten grant recipients were each presented with $10,000 grants during the past two years. “This year we will return to The Fund’s tradition of awarding a single $40,000 grant as well as fellowship awards. Individual recipients of the Howard Chapnick Grant and Smith Student Grant will remain unchanged.” Thode also noted that thanks to the generosity of past grant recipients and finalists, and patrons of the arts, the Smith Fund’s second annual holiday print sale will provide additional funding needed to support documentary photographers and their important projects around the world.
The Smith Fund will continue its partnership with several international photo organizations, encouraging documentary photographers from a variety of demographic and socio-economic backgrounds to submit their work to the annual Smith Fund grants. Organizations currently partnering with the W. Eugene Smith Fund include African Photojournalism Database, African Women in Photography, Authority Collective, Black Women Photographers, Diversify Photo, Everyday Projects, Foto Féminas, Indigenous Photograph, Magnum Foundation, and Women Photograph.