The record, 2012 onwards
Nine annual cycles, one restructured pandemic edition, and the projects each award was given to finish — recorded as it was published at the time.
2012
The Grey Line
The inaugural grant, awarded in September 2012 for a documentation of conscientious objectors — American and British soldiers who spoke out against the Iraq war. The resulting book was highly commended and named among the best photobooks of 2013 by Time, the Observer, the Telegraph and Empire.
2013
Two Sisters
A documentary project about the photographer's unmarried aunts, who live a traditional and ancestral life in rural north-west Russia, tied to the land and to each other. Sablin was subsequently awarded a fellowship by the New York Foundation for the Arts and exhibited the project at Bellevue College in Washington State.
Also commended Myriam Meloni (Italy) for Behind the Absence, on Moldova's economic orphans, and Regine Petersen (Germany) for Fragments, a constructed narrative about meteorite showers. Each received a £500 bursary, mentoring and a contribution from Trolley Books.
2014
Inventing My Father
A personal attempt to reconnect with an absent parent, combining the photographer's own visual storytelling with archival and found photography.
Also commended Sian Davey (Britain) for Looking for Alice, made about the artist's daughter.
2015
Noises in the Blood
An exploration of British dancehall culture that consciously embraces the exotic stereotype in order to examine it, opening a dialogue about English Jamaican women and the immediate distance between photographer and subject.
2016
The Island of the Colourblind
A visualisation of the residents of Pingelap, an atoll in the Pacific Ocean affected by hereditary colourblindness.
2017
First Generation
An ongoing project about the first generation of Afro-French women in France, working on national identity, mixed origin and culture anchored in historical tradition.
2018
Infinite Tenderness
Made from the photographer's own experience of growing up queer in the religious American south.
2019
A portrait of her brother's boyhood
A collaboration on boyhood and the identity of young Black men, arriving as the notion of modern masculinity was being publicly reassessed. The work was later included in a group exhibition on Black male identities at the African American Museum in Philadelphia.
The 2020 cycle was restructured in response to the pandemic and awarded across a much wider field than a single recipient. The photographers below were supported in that edition.
Built around Aida Overton Walker, the celebrated African American vaudeville performer who reinterpreted the cakewalk — a dance originally performed by enslaved people mocking their owners — into a form of elegance and skill, and who used her position to challenge the narrow roles available to Black performers. Agyepong re-imagines the period's postcards as images of self-care rather than oppression, working on ownership, entitlement and mental wellbeing.
Portraits made in Lucknow, Jaipur and Chamkaur Sahib, printed onto fabric of each region and then embroidered by the women photographed, without guidelines, so that each subject holds authority over her own portrayal. The collaboration subverts the idea of the artist as sole producer.
Made by attending cosmetic surgery consultations and asking clinics to write surgery plans for her, then working over collected pre-surgery portraits by hand. The project treats the face as a permit to an aspirational life, and photography as a therapy for self-directed body shaming.
Restaged moments drawn from interviews with family, friends and strangers in Mexico about experiences of discrimination, overdrawn with imagery evoking the internet as a structure that holds people down. The subject is search-engine design and the way it reinforces stereotype.
A record of the photographer's mother's life in Tehran and while visiting her children abroad — one account of the family pattern created by the exile that followed 1979, in a culture with little social provision for the elderly. The prints are painted over in black and white by hand.
At sixteen, Baruch chose to leave his Orthodox Jewish community in order to study, a decision that forced him to question his identity and his future. The project asks how much control anyone has over who they become.
On absence within maternal relationships — the state in which something expected or looked for is not present. As memory morphs, detail dulls and what remains is a summarised version of what happened, which is also a description of a photograph.
Screenprints made from family albums brought to the United States, layered with text. Family albums traditionally celebrate success and omit tragedy; this work returns a mother's manic episode and loneliness to the record alongside the happy moments.
On social issues that are widespread enough to become ambient — and on whether the volume of information people receive drives change or simply becomes the norm.
Rosella works at the intersection of socially engaged art and long-form documentary, out of her own experience of being raised in a heavily policed, low-income community and of watching sisters, friends, partners and extended family move through the prison system. Over more than a decade she has co-created photographic work with people she identifies as co-creators rather than subjects, producing a collective archive of images, moving image, soundscapes, redacted state documents, criminal indexes, letters from jail and ephemera. The grant supported a closer examination of the authority of state archives that maintain the prison industrial complex, and of the counter-archive as a site of resistance.
Sitei graduated in psychology with criminology in 2017 before taking an MA in documentary photography at the University of South Wales. Her work integrates photography and text on themes of stereotype, prejudice and discrimination; her first project, Wundanyi, addressed stigma around rape and the need for it to be a household conversation. She spent her second MA year travelling rural Kenya gathering material, and later a year in South Korea, where she researched her long-term project on albinism.
Highly commended: Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah (Germany), Sumi Anjuman (Bangladesh), Odette England (British/Australian), Marisol Mendez (Bolivia) and Marie Smith (UK).
The panel that decided this cycle is listed on the grant page.
The 2020 cycle was restructured as a Covid-19 edition and spread support across a much wider field instead of naming a single winner. It is the exception in the record rather than the pattern.
Several became books. The Grey Line was named among the best photobooks of 2013 by four publications; Two Sisters was exhibited in the United States after its photographer received a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship; Inventing My Father went on to wide acclaim. That is the return a completion award is looking for.
Yes. In several cycles the panel highly commended additional photographers, and in 2013 each commended photographer received a £500 bursary, mentoring from industry professionals and a contribution from Trolley Books.
No. Shortlists and commendations were published; applications were not. Where an award publishes its shortlists, reading two or three years of them is the most reliable way to judge whether a project fits it.