The Alexia Foundation

The Alexia Foundation by Aline SmithsonJune 30, 2012

As a woman, mother, and photographer, I am so grateful to the incredible Alexia Foundation for their $25,000 grant to acknowledge the abuse of women in the United States. This is the first year that the organization has offered this specific grant and any photographer may apply. However, this award is for an individual photographer; collaborative applications are not accepted.

In every country in the world, women are being abused, trafficked, bartered, sold, burned by fire and acid and killed, sometimes by their own families, for “honor” or anger.

The Alexia Foundation, recognizing that most of the time abuse of women in the United States is hidden, rationalized, ignored, and sometimes worst of all, quietly accepted by the women being abused, has created a grant to provide resources for a photojournalist to produce a project that illuminates any form of abuse of women in the United States but with global significance.

The Alexia Foundation’s main purpose is to encourage and help photojournalists create stories that drive change. While our traditional grant guidelines put no limits on the subject matter for grant proposals, a few proposals about women’s rights in the last few years have been so powerful that they have compelled the Foundation to create a grant specifically on the issue of women’s abuse. Because this issue is so shocking and deplorable – but continues partly because it is so often unseen or ignored – the Foundation will provide a $25,000 grant so a project can be produced that will illuminate the horrors of what is happening, often invisibly in our own communities.

We invite proposals from any photojournalist anywhere in the world, to be submitted by August 15, 2012. For more information, go here.

PUNJAB, INDIA – NOVEMBER 2, 2009: A group of women sits idly in their room inside a protection home in Rothak (Haryana). Many of the residents were rescued after been trafficked to be sold as wives or to work as prostitutes in Haryana and Delhi; they seem almost paralyzed by the trauma of their experiences. Limited to 10 images, this image is not in the original edit, but the power of the faces of the women is not diminished. Walter Astrada/Alexia Foundation

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