W. Eugene Smith Awards

I’ve not consciously come across the work of Joseph Symenkyj before, though a few of the pictures on his web site seem familiar, but his is a name I’ll probably now remember even if I’m rather unsure how to pronounce it. I find he is an American photographer who graduated from the New York School of Visual Arts in 2002, and what finally brought him to my attention in a post on the NY Times Lens blog is that he has been awarded this year’s W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography for his long-term project on family life in Ukraine.  On the web site you can also see his work on more recent events on the streets of the country.

The W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund has also made an award to a more familiar name, Spanish American photographer Moises Saman for his four years of work on the Arab Spring and its aftermath, and there is some fine work on his Magnum pages.

James Estrin in his Lens post also mentions that Muriel Hasbun ‘received the Howard Chapnick award for the “Laberinto” project, a collaborative education and cultural preservation project that documents artists who worked during the Salvadoran civil war.’ I have to say I find most of her work on line leaves me rather cold, rather too academic for my liking, though I do admire her ‘Conversacio‘, a photographic  ‘conversation‘ exchanging photographs with Pablo Ortiz Monasterio.

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