By Holly Stuart Hughes

Photographer Lu Guang of China has won the 2009 W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography for his four-year project on the effects of pollution in his native country. Guang says he will use the $30,000 grant to expand his travels in hopes of “shocking authorities” about the effects of industrial pollution.  The grant was announced at a ceremony Wednesday at the Asia Society in New York City, which also marked the 30th anniversary of the creation of the grant by friends of Smith, a crusading photojournalist who died in 1978.

Helen Marcus, who chaired the jury for this year’s prize, called Guang an “elegant and insightful essayist.” Marcus noted that after Guang’s work on AIDS in China’s Henan province was honored by World Press Photo in 2004, the Chinese government, which had been reluctant to acknowledge the epidemic, solicited Guang’s advice and has subsequently set up health care for AIDS patients. “We hope his work on pollution will have the same lasting effect,” Marcus said.

The jury also awarded a $5,000 fellowship to Krisanne Johnson of Brooklyn for her work on young women coming of age in Swaziland, which has the world’s highest rate of HIV infection.

Three other finalists for the grant were also honored: Matt Eich of Norfolk, Virginia, for “Carry Me Home Ohio,” about poverty-stricken areas of southeastern Ohio; Johann Spanner of Copenhagen for “The Sworn Virgins of Albania,” about women who, following a centuries old tradition, pledge to live their lives as men and remain celibate; and Joseph Sywenkyj from Campton, New Hampshire, and Kiev, Ukraine, for “Verses,” an ongoing project about a Ukrainian couple infected with AIDS and their family.

In addition to Marcus, this year’s jurors were Jeff Rosenheim, curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s department of photography in New York City and Devika Dalet-Singh, founder and director of the Photo-Ink photography gallery in New Delhi.

Also awarded on Thursday was the Howard Chapnick Grant for the Advancement of Photojournalism. The $5,000 grant was awarded to Richard Steven Street, a writer and editor who is preparing a book of  photographer Leonard Nadel’s 1956 study of braceros. Nadel's massive photo essay , most of it previously unpublished, documented the harsh lives of  Mexicans who lived and worked in migrant labor camps in California.

The ceremony marked the 30th anniversary of the grant with tributes to its namesake and an early supporter. David Friend, a W. Eugene Smith Fund board member and editor of creative development for Vanity Fair, announced the upcoming publication of  The Jazz Loft Project,
The book will be a collection of images and recordings Smith made in the 1950s and 1960s. From 1957 to 1965, Smith lived and worked in a Manhattan building that also housed a recording studio for some of the era’s best jazz musicians. Smith's portraits and tapes of their jam sessions are now housed at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, and will be published in November.

Board member Robert Pledge also paid tribute to Marty Forscher, the owner of Professional Camera Repair and an early member and supporter of the Fund board, who died earlier this month. Reading remarks prepared for the ceremony by fellow board member Jim Hughes, Pledge noted that when the Fund needed money, Forscher said, “What we need is an angel,” and persuaded Nikon to sponsor the fund for several years.

This year's W. Eugene Smith Grant is supported by contributions from the Open Society Institute, the estate of Neil J. Stone, Blurb Inc., Canon USA and individual donors. 

 
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