Three winners have been named in inaugural Getty Images Instagram Grant, each receiving US$10,000 and the opportunity to be mentored by one of Getty Images' award-winning photojournalists, including John Moore, Chris McGrath and Andrew Burton. As well as this, the three recipients, from Bangladesh, Brazil and Russia, had their work exhibited at Photoville, the largest annual photographic event in New York City. The grant program was founded to reward photographers documenting stories from underrepresented communities around the world using Instagram.
More than 1,200 entries from photographers in 109 countries were received in the first year of the contest, with the work being judged by an expert panel including National Geographic Photography Fellow, David Guttenfelder, Director of Photography & Visual Enterprise for TIME, Kira Pollack, documentary photographer, Maggie Steber, documentary photographer Malin Fezehai, and co-founder of @EverydayIran and documentary photographer, Ramin Talaie.
Meet the winners
Ismail Ferdous (@afterranaplaza), is a Bangladeshi documentary photographer using Instagram to cover social humanitarian issues. His project, After Rana Plaza, centres around the surviving relatives of those killed in the 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Adriana Zehbrauskas (@adrianazehbrauskas), is a Brazilian-born photographer, currently residing in Mexico City. Her Instagram portfolio covers topics including climate change and the documentation of the everyday lives of Latin Americans. Zehbrauskas plans to use the grant to fund her project, Next of Kin: Family Matters, shooting portraits of the families of 43 students who went missing from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers School, in Guerrero, Mexico, in 2014. She is also a contributor to the Instagram collective, @everydayclimatechange.
Dmitry Markov (@dcim.ru), resides in Pskov, Russia, and volunteers for multiple children’s charities. By sharing his work on Instagram, he hopes to highlightthe plight of orphaned children and encourage society to “look at the problems of such children in a humane way.”
As well as this, an additional five photographers were selected, who will receive a personal mentorship from a member of the Getty Instagram Grant judging panel. They include: Tasneem Asultan (@tasneemalsultan) of Dubai, UAE; Kevin Cook (@kevincookphoto) of Philadelphia, USA; Igor Pisuk (@igorpisuk) of Stockholm, Sweden; Cassandra Giraldo (@afterschoolproject) of New York, USA and Ako Salemi (@f64s125) of Tehran, Iran.