W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund
fund for humanitarian photography
W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund is an organisation established to encourage and support individuals who are active in the field of photography for humanitarian purposes. It gives out the W. Eugene Smith Grant and Howard Chapnick Grant.
Since 1979 the fund has worked to seek out independent voices who work and create outside the boundaries of modern publishing and mass media, following the legacy of W. Eugene Smith. The American photojournalist, working between 1936 and 1978, was committed to the documentation of human condition and suffering. He travelled searching to portray and capture people's behaviour in emotional distress.
For more than thirty years the fund has recognized photographers who explore matters of global importance and address them with integrity and courage.
W. Eugene Smith Grant
Every year a grant is given to a photographer with an innovative and intriguing sight of humans dealing with social, economical, political or environmental issues.
Recipients of W. Eugene Smith Grant
W. Eugene Smith Fellowship
With the award of the Grant, a $5000 (US) Fellowship is also shared between one or more finalists deemed worthy of special recognition.
Recipients of W. Eugene Smith Fellowship
2010: Kosuke Okahara for Ibasyo: self-injury among young Japanese girls
2011: Massimo Berutti for Dusty path
2014: Moises Saman for Discordia: The Arab Spring
2015: Jointly awarded to Mary F. Calvert (for The Battle Within: Sexual Violence in America’s Military) and Marcus Bleasdale (for The Unravelling: Central African Republic).
2016: Oscar B. Castillo
2017: Edmund Clark and Alex Majoli
2018: Sarah Blesener
2019: Siân Davey
2022: Mary F. Calvert
Howard Chapnick Grant
In 1996 a new award was added, the Howard Chapnick Grant, to encourage leadership in fields that are complementary to photojournalism, such as editing research or education and management.
“W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund” enters the record as fund for humanitarian photography. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Eugene, Smith and Memorial can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7945510. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1979, 1936, 1978 and 2010.
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This entry incorporates text from “W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.