WINNER OF MARILYN STAFFORD FOTOREPORTAGE AWARD 2019

HONOURABLE MENTIONS FOR MARILYN STAFFORD FOTOREPORTAGE AWARD 2019

 

We are delighted to announce that ANNA FILIPOVA is the WINNER of the Marilyn Stafford FotoReportage Award 2019 for her work Research At the End Of The World, which focuses on international scientific research taking place in the Arctic region on climate change.

 

The judges Donna Cesare (Photojournalist & Educator), Rebecca Conway (Photographer & former MSFA Winner 2017), Nina Emett (Photographer & FotoDocument Director), Melanie Friend (Photojournalist & Educator), Rebecca Newton (Nikon), Marilyn Stafford and Honorary Judge Lina Clerke (Marilyn’s daughter) deliberated for several hours to select the overall Winner and Honourable Mentions from the fifteen-strong shortlist and were unanimous in the final decisions. The judges agreed that Filipova’s ongoing work Research At The End Of The World is of a very high photographic standard, that it approaches this topical and most important of issues from an under-reported perspective and that it has the potential to create impact through exhibiting at UN Climate Summits around the world, at international photography festivals and within global publications.

 

 

ANNA FILIPOVA

Anna Filipova is a photojournalist. She has worked for the International New York Times and Reuters and has been published in CNN, BBC, Washington Post, The Guardian and The Telegraph, amongst others. Anna specialises in the Arctic region where she explores environmental topics based in remote and inaccessible areas. She has been a grantee of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and National Geographic. She was selected by Anne Hidalgo, the Mayor of Paris and President of C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, as a climate heroin in 2017/18. Anna’s work has been showed at Climate UN summits around the world, Photo London, PhotoVille NY, Festival Arles France and Royal Geographical Society UK.

 

RESEARCH AT THE END OF THE WORLD

Ny-Ålesund is situated on the 79th parallel north on Svalbard archipelago, which makes it the most northerly permanent civilian settlement in the world. It houses the largest laboratory for modern Arctic research in existence. This network of laboratories and research stations is managed by eleven countries. The population of Ny-Ålesund is predominately made up of research scientists. It has very restricted access both because of the scientific projects that are conducted there and the measuring instruments that are situated in the area. Even though the settlement is located away from major sources of human pollution, the atmospheric circulation brings air from Europe and North America into the region. This creates a unique environment on two counts: firstly for the observation of post-global warming conditions and secondly in creating a concentration of international scientific research and collaboration between nations. Over the years Svalbard, Ny-Ålesund has been visited by many significant figures: John McCain, Hilary Clinton, Ban Ki-moon among others, as it is a place where the consequences of climate change can be seen clearly in the surrounding landscape and where they can speak with and learn from the scientists from all over the world. Such Research stations are an integral and crucial resource for policy makers and global enterprises and indeed for every inhabitant of this planet – as these changes in the Arctic climate affect the systemic ecological changes in the rest of the world.

 

 

 

HONOURABLE MENTIONS

The judges felt that 7 of the short-list photographers deserved Honourable Mentions as follows (in alphabetical order):

 

CHRISTIANA BOTIC

 

Christiana Botic is an American news and documentary photographer exploring identity in the Balkans. As a 2016-2017 National Geographic-Fulbright Storytelling Fellow in Serbia and Croatia, she documented stories of refugees along the Balkan Route, lesser-known ethnic minorities in the region, and her own family’s history of migration throughout former Yugoslavia. Botic is currently a Masters Candidate at Ohio University’s School of Visual Communication.

 

 

DIVIDED GENERATION

This work focuses on coming of age in the ethnically-segregated city of Mitrovica, Kosovo, two decades after the Kosovo War. Though the previous generation grew up in a single city speaking both Serbian and Albanian, the post-war generation only knows a divided Mitrovica, where they are raised in different neighbourhoods, sent to different schools, and taught they live in different countries based on their ethnicity. How do young people search for autonomy, find belonging, and create connection in this complex and fragile environment? “Divided Generation” explores everyday life of youth in Mitrovica from different ethnic backgrounds—Serbian, Albanian, Roma, and mixed – as they navigate the uncertain world they were born into.

 

 

 

 

SAMYUKTA LAKSHMI

 

Samyukta Lakshmi is a documentary photographer and photojournalist based in Bangalore, India. Her work focuses on vulnerable communities, social inequality, and climate change. She is a graduate of the Documentary and Photojournalism program at the International Center of Photography, New York. Her work has been published in the The New York Times, Der Spiegel, BBC, Bloomberg News, Quartz, Business Insider USA, MIT Technology Review Magazine, Caravan, Grazia, Yahoo Finance, Deccan Herald.

 

UNBONDED TOGETHER

This work documents women’s self-help groups, made up of former women bonded labourers – a form of modern slavery – and wives and daughters of bonded labourers in Karnataka, India who work together to support each another, gain access to financial services and spearhead changes that affect the entire community.

 

 

 

NIDA MEHBOOB

Nida Mehboob is a photographer & filmmaker based in Lahore, Pakistan. She graduated as a pharmacist but left the field to pursue photography in 2012. Her documentary work got her into several international workshops and fellowships over the years including one year long filmmaking workshop by Goethe-Institut and Prince Claus Fund. She also received a grant and fellowship by Magnum Foundation for their Social Justice Program in New York in 2019. She has been selected as one of the only two Pakistanis to attend Berlinale Film Festival as a Talent in 2020. Her short films have screened at international film festivals including Locarno Open Doors 2018. Her topic of interests includes themes of social injustice varying from religious persecution and gender discrimination in Pakistan. She will be doing a 3 month art residency by Akademie of Arts in Berlin 2020.

 

SURVIVAL GUIDE FOR AHMADIS IN PAKISTAN

In 1974 the state declared the Ahmadi community in Pakistan non- Muslims and criminalised their religious practices including Islamic greetings. They are violently discriminated against and suffer the most under harsh Blasphemy laws. Ahmadis are one of the groups that most seek asylum abroad from Pakistan. This work is a visual record of this  marginalisation in the form of a small photo-book that looks like a guide but actually it is a sarcastic take on the persecution using re-enacted/staged photographs, quotes and statistics.

 

 

 

 

VIVIANA PERETTI

Viviana Peretti is an Italian freelance photographer based between Bogota and New York where in 2010 she graduated in Documentary Photography and Photojournalism from the International Center of Photography (ICP). In 2000, after graduating Magna Cum Laude with a BA in Anthropology from the University of Rome, she moved to Colombia where she completed an MA in Journalism and spent years working as a freelance photographer.
Viviana has received fellowships and awards from ICP, the Fondation Bruni-Sarkozy in France, FotoVisura, CNN, Sony, the World Photography Organization in London, the Moscow International Foto Awards, the Camargo Foundation and the Bogliasco Foundation in the US, the Photo Museum in Bogota, and the Colombian Ministry of Culture, among others. In 2010, she has been selected for the Eddie Adams Workshop in New York.

 

COLOMBIA: A MASS GRAVE

This work highlights the victims of Colombia’s forced disappearances through a visual investigation of altars at the homes of the grieving family members who await their return. According to Colombia’s National Centre for Historic Memory (Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica, CNMH), 82,998 people were forcibly disappeared in the country between 1958 and 2017, at an average rate of one disappearance every six hours over 59 years. Inequality and an oligarchic political system are among the causes of the violence and social failure that Colombia is experiencing almost since its independence from Spain in 1810. The majority of the victims of forced disappearance are humble people – peasants, uneducated young boys forced to grow up before their time in violent slums, unionists, students from public universities and indigenous leaders. Rarely does the crime of forced disappearance affect members of the wealthy oligarchy that rules the country, providing a further explanation of the indifference and ineffectiveness of the judicial system in persecuting the perpetrators of such crime.

 

 

 

ALICE PROUJANSKY

 

Alice Proujansky is a documentary photographer covering women and labour: birth, work, motherhood and identity. Her projects include Birth Culture, Women’s Work and Still Moving: Migrant Families. She is now working on photo essays about her family’s legacy of radical activism and about birth. Alice’s work has been published by New York Magazine, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Nation, the Boston Globe, The New Republic, Fast Company, The Guardian, Cosmopolitan and others. She has received support from the International Women’s Media Foundation, the Magnum Foundation, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Women Photograph, the Solutions Journalism Network and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and was selected for Review Santa Fe 2014 and the New York Portfolio Review 2016 and 2019. She wrote and photographed Go Photo! An Activity Book for Kids, published by Aperture. She has taught photography in underserved communities since 2002, and wrote Aperture On Sight, Aperture’s free photography and visual literacy curriculum.

 

BIRTH WORK

The U.S. is the only industrialised nation with a rising rate of maternal mortality, but there is a movement from within to provide evidence-based, culturally-focused midwifery care in communities facing poor maternal health outcomes and the evidence shows that it is working. Proujansky has photographed birth since 2006; examining the ways that reproductive healthcare embodies access, choice, history, misogyny and structural racism. She has seen that birth outcomes are not just personal experiences, but expressions of a complex interplay of medicine and culture manifested in women’s bodies

 

 

 

 

GRETA RICO

Greta Rico is a Mexican documentary photographer focused on themes related to gender, human rights and social issues. Her work has been published in magazines, print and digital media such as The HuffPost México, Luchadoras, El Universal, Milenio, La Crítica and Lado B among others. She has collaborated with various Mexican, regional, and Latin American civil society organizations (NGOs) that work with human rights, women’s rights and children’s rights. During 2019 Greta was selected as part of the XXXII generation of the Eddie Adams Workshop. Similarly, one of her documentary works was selected in the National Photography Contest 2019 about Human Rights. In May of that same year, she was selected as a Fellow of the International Women’s Media Fund to participate in the “Adelante” Program in Latin America. In April, she was selected for the “Documenting Humanity 2019” sample of the 24HourProject. And in the month of February, she was selected as a finalist in the “XI Edition of the IILA-Photography Award” on gender equity. In the summer of 2018, she was awarded a scholarship by the Bob and Diane Fund to attend the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop in Kolkata, India. That same year, she was part of the selection for the contest “The Force of Women in the face of Disappearances in Mexico”. And in 2017 of the International Photography Contest “Diversity and Peace”.

 

SUBSTITUTE MOTHER

This work began on the same day as the funeral of Rico’s cousin – it documents the many women in Mexico who have become ‘substitute mothers’ due to the high rate of feminicide in the country. Nine women become victims of feminicide every day according to data from UN Women. Even without government recognition this has become a serious security problem, but also a deep and worrying care crisis in the county. Many of these women are mothers. According to data from the National Women’s Institute, it is estimated that from December 2018 to June 2019, there were 4,275 children in an orphanage due to the increase in feminicides in the country.

 

 

 

 

DANIELA SALA

Daniela Sala is an Italian photographer and journalist, based in Rome. Her works have been published by Der Spiegel, The Guardian, El Paìs, Profl, Al-Monitor, il Venerdì di Repubblica, Al Monitor, Internazionale, YoDona, and Elle. She reports mainly from the Middle East, but also worked in South America, Vietnam and Europe. She graduated in Journalism in 2010, at Turin university. In 2016, thanks to a scholarship, she completed the WSP masterclass in Rome in Photo-Journalism and Documentary Photography. She focuses focus mainly on long-term photo project, with a documentary approach. While as a freelance writer and video-maker she keeps covering a variety of social issue, mainly Migration, and Labour exploitation in the Middle-East and in Italy, as a photographer she is mainly focused on projects exploring social issues, identity and stigma. She recently worked on a long-term project about survivors of asylums for mentally hill people in Italy, she covered the rise of In Vitro Fertilization in Gaza, and a silent revolution of a group of women in rural Jordan, who are fighting gender based violence and gender stereotypes through self-defence.

 

I HEAR YOUR SILENCE

This work is an intimate portrait of queer activists in the MENA region of the Middle East, who are finding ways to speak out despite repression and stigma. They are often trapped between a society that is oppressive to non-conforming individuals, and a Westernized narrative that too often sees them as victims and whose only hope is abroad. But despite repression and social stigma they are finding ways to speak out, becoming visible and creating their own families. While in the past years there has been increasing coverage of LGBT-related issues around the world, when it comes to the Middle East most of the focus has been on people seeking asylum abroad or on individuals being persecuted for being gay. While this is a crucial part of the story, the struggle of people who are fighting for change in their local communities is largely overlooked.

 

 

 

The Judges are very pleased with the Marilyn Stafford FotoReportage Award 2019 Winner, the 7 Honourable Mentions and the 15-strong Shortlist. They are all incredibly dedicated and talented women who go to extraordinary lengths to tell under-reported stories in order to make a difference in areas of social, environmental and cultural importance globally.