What is the New Documentarian Award? This award does not refer to a new photographer doing documentary projects, (though a new photographer can certainly enter this contest). Rather, the New Documentarian Award refers to a new approach to showing, sharing, and promoting documentary photography.

What is Documentary Photography?

Documentary photography can take one of several different approaches. There are socially concerned documentary photographers who hope to help bring about change (like Lewis Hine who photographed child laborers in America at the turn of the century) and there are photographers like Berenice Abbott, who, in the 1930’s, used an 8×10 camera to document New York City’s buildings,
with the intention of preserving a place and time.