NEW YORK, NY (October 14, 2009) – A Chinese freelance photojournalist tonight won the $30,000 W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography for his documentary project "Pollution in China."
Lu Guang, 45, was announced at the winner by the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund on Wednesday night in New York during an event marking the group's 30th anniversary.
The photographer, who went to work in a silk factory in the central Zhejiang Province when he was 19, says he became interested in photography "by accident" after he toured a beautiful mountain region with a cousin and the scenery left "a deep impression." Seeing postcards of the mountains, he decided then and there that wanted to learn photography.
After some success in photography, he told an interviewer earlier this year, he was dissatisfied with his pictures so he decided to return to post-graduate studies at the Central Arts and Design Academy in Beijing. Developing a new style of his own, he said, he decided then to dedicate himself to documentary photography, focusing on "social phenomena and people living at the bottom of society."
In 2003, World Press Photo recognized his work for a series of pictures about a scandal in a village in Henan province where people who had been selling their blood were infected with the HIV virus.
This year's Smith Fund jurors were Helen Marcus, Devika Daulet-Singh, and Jeff L. Rosenheim.
