The Aftermath Project’s 2025 grant application for the 1492/1619 American Aftermaths grant is now open. 2025 will mark the fifth, and final, year of this special five-year grant cycle.
Application is open to working photographers world-wide who are interested in creating work that helps illumine aftermath issues, and encourages greater public understanding and discussion of these issues.
One winner will be awarded The Aftermath Project’s $25,000 grant. In addition, four finalists will also receive a $5,000 grant.
Details about the topic — 1492/1619 American Aftermaths — are published on the official website.
The 1492/1619 grant is open to wide interpretation of America’s original sins – the 1492 “discovery” of this land by Christopher Columbus and the assault on indigenous peoples and their cultures which followed; and the 1619 arrival of the first enslaved Africans and the legacy of more than two centuries of a system of slavery based on white supremacy and the treatment of Blacks as chattel.
The Aftermath Project is grounded in the understanding that unresolved conflicts – including those where actual conflict itself has stopped (ie, the Civil War) — continue to have an impact across generations. We welcome proposals that explore the contemporary aftermaths of these historical events, which continue to shape our society today. Proposals may include historical or archival elements; they may be portrait projects; they may be landscapes; they may be surveys or family histories; they may be fine art, conceptual, or documentary projects. Most proposals will focus on 1492 or 1619, but the judges will consider proposals that combine them as well.
The grant is specifically for projects that relate to aftermath of colonialism and enslavement in the United States. We welcome proposals from other countries in the Americas that make a clear connection to these U.S. aftermaths.
The grant is open to working photographers worldwide. Although there are no restrictions on who tells what story, with this grant the organizers are seeking to create a broader playing field, one that makes room for photographers from under-represented communities to tell their own stories.
There are so many ways to examine these American aftermaths; to name just a few: exploring the impact of these post-conflict legacies from the point of view of communities most impacted by them; interrogating the role of white privilege in creating and sustaining these injustices; an examination of the roots of the slave trade in Africa and its continuing impact there.
The Aftermath Project is a non-profit organization committed to telling the other half of the story of conflict — the story of what it takes for individuals to learn to live again, to rebuild destroyed lives and homes, to restore civil societies, to address the lingering wounds of war while struggling to create new avenues for peace. The Project is an outcome of photographer and writer Sara Terry’s five-year-long project, Aftermath: Bosnia’s Long Road to Peace, about the aftermath of the 1992–95 war in Bosnia and Hercegovina.
No Entry Fee!
It's free to enter.
