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Carmignac Photojournalism Award 2021: Venezuela

The 12th edition of the Carmignac Photojournalism Award is dedicated to Venezuela and its hardships at the individual, social and ecological levels.

Application is open to all photographers (press card not needed), of all nationalities. Participation can be individual or collaborative.

Selected by an international jury, the laureate will receive a €50,000 grant to carry out a 6-month field report with the support of the Fondation Carmignac, which produces, upon their return, a travelling exhibition and the publication of a monograph.

Details about this year’s call are available on the official website.

This Latin American region was once an El Dorado bordered by the Caribbean Sea, which operated under a rich and prosperous democracy in the 1960s-1970s. It still holds the world’s largest oil reserves—ahead of Saudi Arabia—and vast mined resources (including gold, iron, steel, and coltan).

Twenty years after the Bolivarian revolution—led by Hugo Chavez and his radical socialist reforms—the country is struggling to extricate itself from a deep economic crisis, marked by the plummeting price of oil, endemic corruption and hyperinflation (3000% in 2020). In under seven years, its GDP has fallen by 80% and importing has been slashed tenfold. In the face of this unrelenting recession, an informal shadow economy is growing.

While the results of the latest elections have gone unrecognized by the international community, the power struggle between the ruling Chavista regime under Nicolás Maduro and opposition leader Juan Guaido is dividing Venezuelan society. These institutional blockages, as well as accusations of electoral fraud or political imprisonment, generate frequent demonstrations and clashes.

These tensions, combined with problems of instability, only worsen the living conditions of Venezuelans, 80% of whom live in extreme poverty and suffer from severe shortages of running water, food and medicine. To date, 5.4 million Venezuelans—one in six inhabitants—live in exile in Colombia, Peru or Ecuador: the most significant migratory crisis in the world behind Syria.

The Carmignac Photojournalism Award will provide support for a photojournalistic project that documents this volatile social crisis.

About Carmignac Photojournalism Award

In 2009, while media and photojournalism faced an unprecedented crisis, Édouard Carmignac created the Carmignac Photojournalism Award in order to support photographers working in the field. Directed by Emeric Glayse, it annually funds the production of an investigative photo reportage into human rights violations globally and the related geostrategic issues.

Previous editions of the Carmignac Photojournalism Award have focused on: Gaza (Kai Wiedenhöfer); Pachtunistan (Massimo Berruti); Zimbabwe (Robin Hammond); Chechnya (Davide Monteleone); Iran (Newsha Tavakolian); Guyana (Christophe Gin); Libya (Narciso Contreras); Nepal (Lizzie Sadin); the Arctic (Kadir van Lohuizen and Yuri Kozyrev); the Amazon (Tommaso Protti) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (Finbarr O’Reilly).

Fondation Carmignac

The Fondation Carmignac, created in 2000, is a corporate foundation centred around two main focuses: an art collection of more than 300 works, and the Photojournalism Award which is issued annually. In partnership with the Fondation Carmignac, directed by Charles Carmignac, Villa Carmignac, an exhibition space open to the public, was created on the site of Porquerolles in order to exhibit the collection and to host cultural and artistic events.