Alexia Competition

As photojournalism students at UK many of you are in the fortunate position of having a diverse pool of talents to pull from, which means that many of you can write very well. Because of that ability I wanted to introduce you to the Alexia Foundation for World Peace. The Alexia Foundation is “dedicated to helping professional and student photographers produce photographs that promote world peace and cultural understanding.” All you young photographers who want to go out into the world and create change through your photographs or are committed to documenting the human condition, this is your chance. To make things better, Alexia will give you both the money to produce your project and an outlet, as they often exhibit the winner’s work at the UN and have just produced a book featuring winner’s from past years. Alexia is essentially a grant competition – you have a project that is burning in your heart, you write a grant proposal saying why this project is important and what you’ll do and how you do it. Past winners have produced projects on Chechnya, the Israeli Security Wall, refugees in Sudan and Sierra Leone. These are students, people your age, who are traveling into the world and making historic images of events and people that are an important and sometimes tragic part of our world’s history. As young people it is very important for you to realize that it is possible for YOU to be doing this kind of work. Now. All you have to do is put forth the effort and have passion for your craft of photojournalism.

The winning student photographer receives $10,000 and gets to spend a semester studying photojournalism in London through the PJ program at Syracuse University. From their website: “The Alexia Foundation offers helps to provide the financial ability for students to improve their knowledge and skills of photojournalism 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”

Alexia begins accepting the 750 word grant applications beginning December 1 of this year and closes the application process at 5 p.m. on February 1. I would really, really like to see some of you enter this competition, and begin the process now. December/February seems like a long way off, especially to put together a 750 word grant proposal but you would be suprised how fast that dealine will sneak up on you. Feel free to stop by my office (Dave’s office) and go over ideas and your actual proposal once you begin writing.