Note: The Documentary Photography Project does not support film. For information on grants for documentary filmmaking, please contact the Sundance Institute, an OSI grantee in Los Angeles, California.
In 2003, the Open Society Institute launched the Documentary Photography Project. Through exhibits, workshops, grantmaking, and public programs, the project explores how photography can shape public perception and effect social change. The Documentary Photography Project supports photographers whose work addresses social justice and human rights issues that coincide with OSI’s mission.
The most prominent activity of the Documentary Photography Project is the Moving Walls exhibition series, an artistic interpretation of obstacles such as political oppression, economic instability, and racism—and the struggles to tear those barriers down. Launched in 1998, this group photography exhibition is shown at OSI offices in New York City and Washington, D.C., cultural and educational institutions in Baltimore, Maryland, and other locations.
In 2006, OSI began an international tour of seven past Moving Walls photographers in the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Caucasus in partnership with OSI’s Middle East & North Africa Initiative and Arts and Culture Program. At each tour location, the Documentary Photography Project works with local partners to organize a concurrent exhibition by a local photographer and provides a free training workshop for local photojournalists. OSI’s Network Debate Program offers youth media workshops to high school students in each exhibition location, using Moving Walls for the curriculum.
Apart from Moving Walls, the Documentary Photography Project awards distribution grants to individual photographers who—in partnership with an NGO, advocacy organization, or other entity—propose creative ways to distribute completed bodies of work and use photography as an advocacy tool. Since 2005, 19 distribution grants have been awarded through an annual competition.
The Documentary Photography Project’s other grantmaking activity includes production grants to organizations, as well as small discretionary grants awarded on a case-by-case basis to projects with broad impact in the photographic community.
Through the "Photography As Advocacy" public-forum series, the project explores how photography can be used to shape policy and perception, and to advocate for social change.
Past support for photography production came from the following OSI programs: the Individual Project Fellowships Program, the Project on Death in America, the Soros Justice Media Fellowships, and the Katrina Media Fellowships.
The Documentary Photography Project provides competitive grants to photographers who, in collaboration with partner organizations, present their work to specific audiences to stimulate positive social change. In 2006, the project awarded eight grants for photography on immigrant experiences in Greece and the United States, life in the townships of Cape Town, South Africa, abandoned parks in New York, cancer survivors, victimization of women, and the impact of oil development on the Amazon. Many of the photography projects will be shown in the affected communities and in outdoor settings.
Since its inception in 1998, the photography exhibition Moving Walls has presented 12 shows and the work of over 70 photographers whose creative visual interpretations of the obstacles to social justice provoke debate and promote social change. In 2006, OSI began touring an international version of Moving Walls in the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Caucasus in partnership with other OSI programs. The international exhibition includes training workshops for local photographers.
Many of the photographs in the Soros Foundations Network 2006 Annual Report, including the portfolios on China and Migration from Cameroon to France, are the work of Moving Walls photographers, and the collaborative behind Brazil’s Favelas received a distribution grant.
