Jonas Bendiksen Wins Coveted $50,000 National Geographic Grant
Monday, May 12, 2008 @ 17:15
Jonas Bendiksen walked away with the second annual National Geographic magazine photography grant this week. This highly coveted prize goes to support a photographer's work on a long-term project considered to be of worth from a humanitarian perspective. Bendiksen is a Magnum photographer who has been working to document urban population growth.
The grant will be used to record the population explosion in a city in western China called Chongqing; it is thought to be the fastest growing metropolis in the world at this time.
To award this prize, judges from the National Geographic reviewed entrants' existing photographic works, as well as proposals that the photographers submitted with their grant request materials. Bendiksen has covered the growth of urban slums in many cities, and his proposal to continue that work in Chongqing was seen as a logical extension of all the work he has already done in this area. National Geographic saw it as a worthwhile project for which the establishment of this grant was intended.
Bendiksen is no stranger to National Geographic, and he has shot several projects for them before. But the purpose of this grant is entirely different from the normal National Geographic assignment work. It is to fund a worthwhile project that might not otherwise be undertaken due to lack of a sponsor, rather than just to support normal work that will appear in any of the magazine's issues.
This is only the second year the National Geographic has awarded this grant and last year it went to photographer Eugene Richards for a project on veterans of the Iraq war and their families.
