Palu, Lynch, Win 2010 Alexia Foundation Grants
SYRACUSE, NY (February 24, 2009) – NPPA member Louie Palu is the winner of the 2010 Alexia Foundation Grant for professionals, and NPPA member Juliette Lynch, a senior photojournalism major at Syracuse University, is the student winner, the Alexia Foundation announced.
The Alexia Foundation for World Peace was established by the family of Alexia Tsairis, an honors photojournalism student at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University who was a victim of the terrorist bombing of Pan Am flight #103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, on December 21, 1988. She was returning home for the Christmas holidays after spending a semester at the Syracuse University London Centre.
Alexia, known as a promising photojournalism student, had interned for the Associated Press in New York City and she was deeply committed to world peace, supporting the efforts of Amnesty International and Greenpeace. The annual photography grants to professionals and students are "dedicated to helping photographers produce pictures that promote world peace and cultural understanding."
Palu won the 2010 $15,000 Alexia Foundation professional grant for his proposal to document Kandahar, Afghanistan, the birthplace of the Taliban and "the center of all crossroads through this region of Asia for centuries. It is here that I believe the world must focus to understand the people, their hopes and needs to find a path to end this conflict," the photographer wrote in his proposal.
"I want to begin by thanking the Alexia Foundation for this support, so I can continue to witness and document the Afghan people and events in Kandahar," Palu told News Photographer magazine today.
"My greatest hope is that in some way this work can educate and inform people of what is happening there. Support such as this ensures focused and long-term coverage of an issue regardless of the news cycle or whether the story is popular or not.
"My inspiration for this work came at the age of 16 when a friend gave me a book by British photojournalist Don McCullin, which forever changed my life. His tragic but powerful work inspired me to persevere and believe in what you do and to take risks despite the odds stacked against a person. I also want to start balancing the coverage of the war and look more at the Afghan civilian situation. Once labeled as 'The Forgotten War' by many in the media only a few years ago, when I arrived in Kandahar in 2006 and up until 2008 very little international media was interested in Afghanistan. I hope we never forget like that again," Palu said.
Palu also recently completed shooting a 9-chapter video podcast project for The Atlantic called "Unconventional Warfare", footage of combat in Afghanistan which he narrates with voiceover. "The 'Surprise Attack' chapter was shot just after we retreated back to base and were attacked again," Palu said. The video chapters are online here.
There were 210 applications from professionals that after, four rounds, the judges narrowed to seven finalists.
Also in the professional division AKM Shehab Uddin won a Special Recognition Grant of $7,500 from the Foundation. This is only the second time in the history of the foundation that a second award has been made. Uddin will document "pavement dwellers," in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Palu is a documentary photographer based in Washington, DC, and he's represented by ZUMA Press. He graduated from the Ontario College of Art in 1991.
Palu's persistence has paid off, Alexia chair and Syracuse University associate professor David Sutherland said. "He has applied for the Alexia grant several times and was a finalist last year." His work has appeared in numerous publications, festivals and exhibitions internationally, which includes the photojournalism festival Visa Pour L'Image in Perpignan, France and the 2009 New York Photo Festival.
Lynch won the Alexia student competition with a proposal to document the difficulties teenage girls have growing up in today's society, even in upper middle class communities. She has been a photography intern at the Cape Cod Times and an Education Intern at the International Justice Mission in Washington, DC.
"I feel incredibly honored to have been given the opportunity to continue with my project," Lynch told News Photographer. "My hope and prayer is that the work can increase people's awareness of the difficulties that young women in American culture face, and recognize the significant influence that parents and peers have in the development of their identity and purpose."
For winning the Alexia, Lynch is awarded a full tuition scholarship to study photojournalism at Syracuse University in London in the Fall of 2010, plus a $1,000 cash grant to help produce her project.
Second place student winner Muhammad Murtada, from Dhaka, Bangladesh, has a degree in commerce and is now in his third year for a degree in photojournalism from Pathshala, the South Asian Institute for Photography. Murtada is awarded a half tuition scholarship to study photojournalism at Syracuse University in London in the Fall of 2010, plus a $500 cash grant to help produce his project.
Award of Excellence student winners were Ryan Henriksen, a senior at Ohio University; Cody Duty, a senior at Western Kentucky University; and Diego James Robles, a senior at Ohio University. Each Award of Excellence winner receives a $1,600 scholarship that pays part of tuition, fees and living expenses to study photojournalism in London in the fall semester at Syracuse University in London and a $500 cash grant to help produce their proposed stories.
The foundation says that 54 students applied to the competition this year. The judging was done at Syracuse University on February 20, 2010. The judges were Tom Kennedy, of Kennedy Multimedia; Pam Chen, senior editor for photography and multimedia for the Open Society Institute; and Patty Reksten, director of photography at the Portland Oregonian.
Complete details of the finalists and judging and portfolios are online at the Alexia Foundation Web site.
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