Getty Images Awards “Inclusion” Grants to Eight Photojournalists Worldwide

Getty Images has announced the recipients of its annual Editorial Inclusion Grants, a $5,000 award given to editorial photographers and videographers worldwide who are at emerging stages of their careers and come from underrepresented backgrounds. Eight photojournalists won the prize for a total of $40,000 awarded across the categories of News, Sports, Arts and Entertainment, and Multimedia.

Inclusion Grant recipient Brandon Watson is a photographer based in Buffalo and Rochester, New York whose editorial work is largely focused on portraiture.

The grant is a partnership between Getty Images; Women Photograph, a nonprofit that centers women and non-binary artists; and Diversify Photo, an organization that works with large media outlets to diversify the photographers they publish. This year’s panel of judges comprised photographers and visual editors and directors from news publications including the Associated Press, the New York Times, and Rolling Stone.

Melissa Perez Winder is a journalist and filmmaker based in Oakland, California, who documents individual people’s stories amidst larger American political themes.

Lexi Parra is a photographer based in Caracas, Venezuela, whose work explores themes of inequality and violence.

Parra’s work focuses largely on youth culture in Venezuela.

“The submissions we saw during this year’s program were extremely varied in focus and style of storytelling, which was inspiring,” Getty Images’s Senior Vice President of Content Ken Mainardis said in a press release.

Those storytellers include Ivan McClellan, whose work documents Black cowboys in America; Lexi Parra, a photographer based in Caracas, Venezuela whose images examine youth culture and themes of inequality and violence; and Barbara Peacock, whose series American Bedroom (2017–present) offers glimpses into people’s most intimate spaces.

In her series *American Bedroom,* Barbara Peacock creates vulnerable portraits of people in the places they sleep.

One particularly captivating image from Peacock’s series is a 2017 portrait of 88-year-old Pepere in Jay, Maine, that captures not only a private space, but a private thought. “When I wake up in the morning I try to be quiet so I don’t wake her, then I remember she is not there,” Pepere told Peacock of his wife Rita G. Jean, who passed away the previous year after 61 years of marriage. In other American Bedroom works, Peacock photographs lovers together, creating vulnerable pictures where nothing can be hidden. Aspects of her subjects’ identities that are normally invisible to the outside world — the intricacies of their relationships, the eccentric objects around their room, their unmade beds — are on full display.

Barbara Peacock’s photographs put her subjects’ eccentricities on full display, reminding viewers of the nuances behind every person they meet.

The complete list of Inclusion Grant recipients is as follows: Mahé Elipe, Lexi Parra, Ana Elisa Sotelo, Ivan McClellan, Barbara Peacock, Brandon Watson, Rehab Eldalil, and Melissa Perez Winder.