DURHAM, NC (July 6, 2009) – Photographer Teru Kuwayama and writer Christian Parenti have won the 19th annual Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.
The $20,000 award is given yearly to encourage collaboration in documentary work in the tradition of Lange and social scientist and writer Paul Taylor. Lange and Taylor worked for many years on documentary projects, including American Exodus (1941).
Kuwayama and Parenti's project, "Unnatural Borders, Open Wounds: The Human Landscape of Pakistan," will explore Pakistan "through the lives of its myriad ethnic and tribal groups, and its vast population of refugees and displaced peoples."
In 2006, Kuwayama was awarded a W. Eugene Smith Fellowship Grant for his project, “No Man’s Land: Survival at the Ends of Empire.” The fellowship was a $5,000 prize.
The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke today said that together, Kuwayama and Parenti propose to investigate the multi-faceted nature of Pakistani national identity and to probe some of the underlying causes for the country's instability. "Our goal is to approach the complexity of this nation's history and its future through the individual portraits and histories of the people who have been swept across its borders," their winning proposal said.
Kuwayama and Parenti first met in Baghdad in 2003, the Center said. The duo were in Iraq independently, but over the course of their travels they visited many of the same places and recorded parallel journeys. They later coauthored the book The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq. In 2004, they traveled together in Afghanistan for six weeks.
Kuwayama is a freelance photojournalist based in New York. His photographs have appeared in such magazines as Time, Newsweek, National Geographic, Outside, Fortune, and Vibe. He has received awards and fellowships from the Eugene Smith Fund, the Alicia Patterson Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Alexia Foundation, and the South Asian Journalists Association, among others. He is a 2009-2010 John S. Knight Foundation Fellow at Stanford University, with a focus on conflict reporting in South Asia. He is also cofounder of the Web-based network Lightstalkers and the curator of the traveling exhibition Battlespace: Unrealities of War.
Parenti is a contributing editor for The Nation and Playboy. He has reported extensively from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. His work has appeared in Fortune, The Nation, Playboy, Salon, The London Review of Books, the International Herald Tribune, and Mother Jones. He has written three books, including The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq (The New Press, 2004), and has a Ph.D. in sociology from the London School of Economics. Parenti has been a Soros Senior Justice Fellow and a Ford Foundation Fellow at the City University of New York's Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. He is currently a Rockefeller Brothers Fund supported research fellow at the Nation Institute.
