Philip Hyde Environmental Grant applications accepted through October 30, 2015.
Blazing orange Tennessee shiners and yellow striped saffron shiners densely pack in around a stoneroller on a rock nest in a small Smoky Mountain National Park river. Image © David Herasimtschuk, 2014 Philip Hyde Environmental Grant recipient.
What difference do your photographs make?
Applications are now available for NANPA’s Philip Hyde Environmental Grant, a $2,500 award given annually to an individual NANPA member actively pursuing completion of a peer-reviewed environmental project featuring natural photography as a medium of communication, nature appreciation and environmental protection. Application deadline is October 30, 2015 at midnight PDT.
Past recipients include Paul Colangelo (2010), whose efforts to bring the remote and largely unseen Sacred Headwaters of British Columbia to the attention of lawmakers and citizens outside of the Tahltan First Nation played a key role in vacating Shell Oil Company from a million acres slated for methane development; Amy Gulick (2008), whose award-winning book Salmon in the Trees, traveling exhibits, lectures and YouTube videos tell a hopeful story of Alaska’s Tongass rain forest, a rare ecosystem where salmon grow trees and support an abundance of bears and bald eagles; and C.C. Lockwood (2008), whose photographs showcase disappearing swamplands that threatened the culture and economy of Louisiana, as featured in the PBS documentary Atchafalaya Houseboat.
As applicants for the Philip Hyde Environmental Grant, these photographers successfully demonstrated the ways in which their still photographs would make a difference to specific decision-makers wrestling with a timely issue. Additionally, at the time of application, these projects were already well underway, with established collaborations, realistic schedules and practical budgets. These factors made for compelling applications that fared well in scoring.
Click here for complete guidelines, a link to the online application and additional tips for applicants.
The inaugural Philip Hyde Environmental Grant was awarded in 1999. It was established in honor of Philip Hyde, recipient of NANPA’s 1996 Lifetime Achievement Award.
Although he studied under Ansel Adams, Minor White and Edward Weston, Hyde describes his work as evolving past the hard and fast definitions of his early training. “I am not interested in pretty pictures for postcards. I feel better if I just get a few people to see something they haven’t seen before,” writes Hyde.
The Philip Hyde Environmental Grant honors this spirit, supporting photographers who clearly document in application materials the ways in which their projects reach influential people—not necessarily the mass public—and challenge them to discover something new about an imminent environmental issue.
Hyde, whose photograph “Cathedral in the Desert, Glen Canyon, Utah, 1964” was named one of the top 100 photographs of the 20th Century by American Photo magazine, played a key role in protecting Dinosaur National Monument, the Grand Canyon, the Coast Redwoods, Point Reyes, King’s Canyon, Canyon de Chelly, the North Cascades, Canyonlands, the Wind Rivers, Big Sur and many other National Parks and wilderness areas.