W. Eugene Smith Fund
/OVERVIEW: The W. Eugene Smith Fund provides grants, fellowships, and awards for individual photographers developing projects in humanistic photography.
IP TAKE: This funder is not looking to support photographers whose work mimics Eugene Smith’s. Instead, it prefers to award grants to individuals and projects with the potential for exemplary and compelling photojournalism. Grant seekers should look at the work of previous grantees to see what types of projects the fund has selected in the past. In several cases, applications require a $50 entrance fee.
PROFILE: Established in 1980, the W. Eugene Smith Fund was created to honor the legacy of its namesake, Gene Smith, a photographic essayist for Life magazine and other publications. It seeks to support “supports photographers whose work follows the tradition of W. Eugene Smith’s humanistic photography and dedicated compassion evidenced during his 45-year career as a photographic essayist.” The Smith Fund supports grants, fellowships, and special awards.
Grants for Visual Arts and Photojournalism
The organization loosely defines Humanistic Photography as photography “imbued with moral fervor [that] evinces a clear difference between good and evil, the individual’s ability to transcend his or her circumstances, the inherent goodness (even heroism) in people, [and] the capacity and willingness of one person to help others.”
The W. Eugene Smith Grant is the organization’s flagship award, $40,000. It seeks to help a photographer begin or complete a project that uses photojournalism to “address an issue […] related to the human condition; social change; humanitarian concern; armed conflict or interpersonal, psychological, cultural, social environmental, scientific, medical and/or political significance, ideally expressing an underlying acknowledgement of our common humanity.” Proposals for projects incorporating multimedia elements are permitted.
The Howard Chapnick Grant is a $10,000 grant that honors an individual for his or her leadership in any field ancillary to photojournalism, such as editing, research, education and management. This grant will not support photographers or the production of photography.
Grants for Higher Education
The W. Eugene Smith Student Grant is a $5,000 open to college student photographers. Similar to the Smith Grant, it seeks to help a student photographer begin or complete a project that uses photojournalism to “address an issue […] related to the human condition; social change; humanitarian concern; armed conflict or interpersonal, psychological, cultural, social environmental, scientific, medical and/or political significance, ideally expressing an underlying acknowledgement of our common humanity.” Projects incorporating multimedia elements are permitted. The Smith Fund also offers the $5,000 W. Eugene Smith Fellowship and two W. Eugene Smith Special Awards for $2,500 each.
Important Grant Details:
Grants range from $2,500 to $40,000. Since 1980, the W. Eugene Smith Fund has presented more than $1 million in grants and fellowships to photographers around the world. View past grantees and examples of their work here.
The Smith Foundation accepts applications consisting of a brief biography, CV, project proposal or description, and portfolio sample.
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