Maisie Crow wins 2009 Ian Parry Scholarship
The Ian Parry Scholarship 2009 has been won by the US photographer Maisie Crow with a portfolio of images - ‘Love Me’ - that documents the life of a teenage girl, Autumn, coming of age in a small town in the state of Ohio, USA.
The Ian Parry Scholarship is an international competition open to young photographers who are attending a full-time photographic course or who are under the age of 24. It was established in memory of the photojournalist Ian Parry who died in 1989, aged just 24, when covering the Romanian Revolution whilst on assignment for The Sunday Times.
Maisie Crow describes her ‘Love Me’ project - shot on the Canon EOS 5D and EOS 5D Mark II DSLRs with an EF35mm f/1.4L USM lens - as: “young women coming of age in the cycle of generational poverty.” It began after she struck up a conversation with a man at the side of the road in a town near Athens, Ohio. The man was Autumn’s father. She went back to the family house and spent the afternoon there. Crow explained: “I was drawn to Autumn immediately, but I didn’t know why, so I started going back, and the closer I became to her the more I realised she had a very important story to share – similar to what a lot of young women in that area are going through.”
Autumn sits between a relative’s legs. She alleges that he tried to rape her when she was 13-years-old but says that her parents do not believe her.
Crow revealed: “Every project I’ve done has come from just running into someone and learning more about who they are and how it fits into larger issues in the world.” Crow intends to carry on with the ‘Love Me’ series focusing on the experiences of other young woman in the Appalachian area of Ohio.
As well as the £3,000 assignment prize to go towards her chosen assignment Maisie Crow is automatically added to the final list of nominees for the World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass in Amsterdam.
The judging took place at the Frontline Club, London on 3 July 2009 and the judges gave a ‘highly commended’ award to Canadian photojournalist Ed Ou, and ‘commended’ accolades to Carl Kiilsgaard, Adam Lau and Saikat Mojumber. They each receive a £500 prize. A selection of the Ian Parry Scholarship 2009 work by the winner, highly commended and commended entries will be published in the Sunday Times magazine.
The judging panel included photojournalists Eugene Richards and Tom Stoddart, Steve Blogg (Getty Images), John Jones (deputy picture editor of The Times newspaper), Simon Bainbridge (editor of the British Journal of Photography), Stephen Reid (art director of the Sunday Times magazine), and various members of Ian Parry’s family.
Nurse Larissa Soboleva holds two-year-old Adil Zhilyaer in an orphanage in Serney, Kazakhstan. Adil was born blind and afflicted Infantile Cerebral Paralysis (ICP) and hydrocephalia as a result of his mother’s exposure to radiation during years of Soviet weapons testing during the Cold War. He was abandoned by his parents and is now cared for in an orphanage.
Eugene Richards explained: “The judging was a hard-driven affair... Everyone in that darkened projection room came to agree that the winner of the Ian Parry had to be someone who was expressing a ‘personal vision’, as opposed to a more generic, commercially viable one. Plus the winner had to have something tangible to say about the world we live in. Each of us agreed that the Ian Parry award should go to Maisie Crow.”
Ed Ou spoke to CPN about his project - shot on the EOS 5D Mark II and EOS 5D with the EF24mm f/1.4L II USM and EF50mm f/1.2L USM lenses - documenting the lives of people in Kazakhstan affected by nuclear testing. He explained: “Generations of Kazakh people have been, and will continue to be affected by unprecedentedly high levels of radiation for years to come – but very few people in the west are aware of what has happened.” Ou now plans to work on a story in Somalia and Yemen: “following refugees from the Horn of Africa as they make the perilous journey on smuggler boats across the Gulf of Aden to Yemen.”
A print exhibition showcasing all of the winning entries in the Ian Parry Scholarship 2009, plus an edited selection of other entries, will take place for one week from 5 August 2009 at the Getty Images Gallery in central London.
