Foto Féminas
Latin America and the Caribbean
A platform established by Verónica Sanchis Bencomo, promoting the work of women photographers across Latin America and the Caribbean through monthly online features.
About
About this archive of women photographers and photography grants
A written record of a decade of documentary and fine-art practice, set alongside the funding routes that are still open to photographers working now.
What Firecracker was
Firecracker was established in 2011 by Fiona Rogers to promote women working in photography, through online features, networking opportunities and public events. In 2012 it launched its inaugural Photographic Grant, awarded to a female or non-binary photographer to help complete a documentary project. Over the decade that followed it championed the work of female, female-identifying and non-binary photographers internationally through its online platform, its annual grant, its social channels and an events programme.
Rogers is Director of Photography and Operations for Webber Represents and Webber Gallery, and was previously Chief Operating Officer of Magnum Photos. She is the author of Firecrackers: Female Photographers Now, published by Thames & Hudson, has judged competitions including the MACK First Book Award and the Getty Images Grant for Editorial Photography, sits on the boards of the Martin Parr Foundation and the Peter Marlow Foundation, and advises the Royal Photographic Society.
What this site does with that record
The features and the grant announcements were published monthly for over a decade and then went quiet. This site keeps the readable part of that record in one place: 22 written entries on individual photographers and their projects, the full list of grant recipients from 2012 onwards, and the panels that chose them.
It also does one thing the original record did not. Because the most useful question a photographer brings to an archive like this is where the money is now, the site maintains a directory of open calls and a guide to applying alongside the historic material, recording awards by awarding body, eligibility and cycle rather than by a deadline that would be out of date within weeks.
How the entries are compiled
Each entry describes a body of work as it was presented at the time it was published, in the third person, and gives the month it appeared. Where a photographer's own words were part of the published feature, they are reported as theirs.
Two limits are worth stating plainly. First, no photographs are reproduced — copyright stays with the photographers, and describing work in writing is preferable to using it without a licence. Second, the entries published in the platform's first years no longer exist in verifiable form; those photographers are named in the index with the month they appeared, and nothing further is claimed about them. A record with visible gaps is more useful than one with invented content in the gaps.
The scope is documentary and fine-art practice. Commercial and lifestyle photography fall outside it, as they did originally.
Dates follow the same rule as everything else here: each entry carries the month of its original publication, not the date this site was assembled, so the index reads as the record it is — a monthly sequence running from 2011 to 2022 — rather than as a retrospective written all at once. Where an entry discusses what happened to a project after its publication, that later material is marked as later.
Elsewhere
Other platforms supporting women in photography
Four organisations working on the same problem from different regions, recorded here because the original platform recommended them and because a photographer looking for a route in is better served by four than by one.
Rawiya Collective
Middle East
The first women's photo collective from the Middle East, which opened membership to male photographers in late 2016. Its work tends to concern cultural stereotype, gender roles, politics, displacement and culture, in the region and beyond.
Lumina Collective
Australia
Founded in 2017, a collective of photographic artists working on visual storytelling and its distribution, with an emphasis on building capacity through collaboration.
Women Photograph
Global
A private database of independent women documentary photographers, available to commissioning editors and organisations, alongside annual project grants, a year-long mentorship programme and a travel fund for workshops and festivals.
Questions about this archive
What is recorded on this site?
Three things: how the Firecracker Photographic Grant worked and who received it, a directory of other grants and open calls that women photographers can apply to, and written entries on the photographers documented under the Firecracker name.
Where does the information come from?
From the published record — the grant's own announcements of its recipients and panels, the monthly features as they were published, and the photographers' published biographies. Where a record could not be verified, the entry says so rather than filling the gap.
Why are there no photographs?
Copyright in the work stays with the photographers who made it. Reproducing it would require a licence for each image, so the archive describes the work in writing instead and leaves the pictures where they belong.
Can a listing be corrected or removed?
Yes. Entries are drawn from published material and any photographer who wants a correction made, or an entry taken down, can have that done.