Tom Kennedy Announces Alexia Foundation Grant Entry Deadlines
SYRACUSE, NY (December 1, 2010) – Tom Kennedy, contest administrator for The Alexia Foundation and the new Alexia Foundation Chair Professor for Documentary Photography at the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, has announced the dates for its 22nd annual photojournalism grant competition.
The Alexia competition is open to professionals and students in separate categories.
The professional grant proposals and accompanying photographic portfolio will be due by 5 p.m. EDT on January 18, 2011, Kennedy says, and the student deadline will be 5 p.m. EDT on February 1, 2011.
"The Alexia Foundation promotes the power of photojournalism to give voice to social injustice, to respect history lest we forget it, and to understand cultural difference as our strength — not our weakness," Kennedy said. "Through grants and scholarships, The Alexia Foundation supports photographers as agents for change."
In the professional category, the Alexia Grant was not established with the single purpose of rewarding the best photographers, Kennedy says.
"It is not a portfolio competition. The grants are awarded to a photojournalist who can further cultural understanding and world peace by conceiving and writing a concise, focused, and meaningful story proposal, and who can demonstrate the ability to visually execute that story with compelling images. There is no mathematical formula for determining grantees, but the proposal and photography must both be considered of the highest quality."
In the student category, The Alexia Foundation offers help to provide the financial ability for students to improve their knowledge and skills of photojournalism, Kennedy says, and to increase their own knowledge and understanding of other cultures by providing scholarships to study photojournalism at Syracuse University in London, England.
"The Foundation also provides cash grants to enable student photographers to have the financial ability to produce a picture story that furthers the Foundation's goals of promoting world peace and cultural understanding."
Created by the family of Alexia Tsairis, the foundation honors the memory of Alexia, an honor photojournalism student in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University who was one of 35 students who perished in the terror bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in December 1988. She was returning for the Christmas holiday after a semester of study at Syracuse University’s London Centre in the Syracuse Study Abroad program.
The young photojournalist was deeply committed to using her photography as an instrument for world peace and she was considered by her faculty at the time as one of Syracuse University’s most promising photojournalism students, having successfully completed two successive summers as an intern in the New York offices of Associated Press as a photography intern.
Tsairis' abiding beliefs were in the capacity and responsibility of individuals to promote peace and cultural understanding. To that end, the foundation sponsors an annual competition to award funds to students and professionals seeking to do such work, particularly on stories and issues that go under-reported in mainstream media.
Syracuse University will again host the competition judging which will take place over three days, from February 18 through February 20, 2011.
Kennedy, who succeeded David Sutherland in the role of Alexia Chair Professor, has announced that Eliane Laffont, Bob Sacha, and Annie Griffiths will be the judges for this coming year’s competition.
Laffont serves on the Alexia Foundation’s board of directors in addition to being the editorial director for Hachette Filipacchi Media’s operation in the United States. She has also been a long-time senior consultant to Visa Pour L’Image, the annual photojournalism festival in Perpignan, France.
Sacha is an independent multimedia producer in New York City as well as a teacher at CUNY and Columbia.
Griffiths was one of the first women to work for National Geographic magazine, and she's photographed dozens of magazine stories an book projects for the Society.
Entry forms and a description of the rules for both categories can be found on the Foundation’s Web site at http://alexiafoundation.org. The entry process is done digitally through the Web site.
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