Open Society Documentary Photography Project Announces 2011 Audience Engagement Grants

The Documentary Photography Project is pleased to announce recipients of the 2011 Audience Engagement Grants.

The Audience Engagement Grants support photographers to take an existing body of work on a social justice or human rights issue and devise an innovative approach to use the images as a tool for social change. With these grants, we aim to inspire photographers to actively engage viewers.

The most inspiring proposals outlined thoughtful and locally relevant ways to use photography to work toward a specified goal. Often the projects had a big-picture vision and included ways to address a concrete immediate need.

2011 Recipients

Shahidul Alam (Bangladesh)

Alam will partner with Drik Picture Library and the Queens Museum of Art and use the “Crossfire” exhibit and accompanying interactive Google maps to mobilize communities and gather international support to end state sponsored extra-judicial killings in Bangladesh.

Dalia Khamissy (Lebanon)  

Khamissy will partner with SOLIDE (Support of Lebanon in Detention and Exile) to mobilize youth around the fate of people who went missing during the 1975-90 Lebanese civil war.

Carlos Javier Ortiz (Chicago, Illinois)  

Ortiz will partner with the Chicago Youth Boxing Club on “Too Young to Die,” a project that seeks to engage young people from Chicago’s Little Village, North Lawndale, and Cicero communities who have been affected by violence.

Laurie Jo Reynolds (Chicago, Illinois)

Reynolds will partner with Tamms Year Ten and the National Religious Campaign Against Torture to gather and create photography of things real or imagined requested by people held in long‐term solitary confinement at supermax prisons in Illinois, Maine, and Virginia.

Pamela Yates (United States/Guatemala)

Yates will partner with Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala (FAFG) and Skylight Pictures on “Granito: Every Memory Matters,” a multi-platform, intergenerational approach to restoring the collective memory of the Guatemalan genocide.