Grant

UNSUNG – Srishti Digilife Grant for Photography is an annual,  no strings attached award for documentary photographers in India. This grant will be given to a documentary/art photographer to further his/her practice (not to carry out a specific project). Photographers will be nominated by a board of 3 people, consisting of Mahesh Bhat (Founder of UNSUNG), Radhakrishnan Vijayakumar (Managing Director of Srishti Digilife Pvt. Ltd.), and the winner of the previous year’s award.  There is no process to apply for the award. A panel of eminent jurors will select the winner. 

The third UNSUNG-Srishti Digilife grant was awarded to Jaisingh Nageswaran for his work on socially marginalised communities, exploring themes of gender identity, caste discrimination, and issues of rural life. He is based in Vadipatti village, Tamilnadu.

The second UNSUNG-Srishti Digilife grant was awarded to Menty Jamir. She is from Nagaland and is based in Delhi. Her lyrical, poetic, personal documentary work was appreciated by our jurors, Curator Lina Vincent and Photographer Dinesh Khanna. Other nominees were Paromita Chatterjee, Kunga Tashi and Vivek Muthuramalingam.

The inaugural grant was awarded to ZhaZo Miachieo. He has worked with India Today and Hindustan Times as a photo journalist.  ZhaZo now lives and works in Nagaland. His work on the magic of the daily life of his land and people caught our imagination. Photographer Dinesh Khanna, Artist & Educator Ayisha Abraham were the jurors. Photographers Kavir Rai and Harsha Vadlamani were the other nominees for 2020.

Dinesh Khanna
ZhaZo is, what thinks of as a natural and instinctive photographer. One who is more interested in what is natural for him, rather that what he is expected to engage with. In essence, his photographs are an extension of how his lives in his world. This is what propelled him away from his job as a Photojournalist in a big city, which would actually be a dream come true for any young person, and made him return to his roots and homeland Nagaland. I found this extremely interesting and brave of him. Also the fact that he wants to tell the story of contemporary Naga life from the inside, for all its everydayness, ordinariness and not just as the exotic and unusual, is a project worth supporting and, i believe, the grand should be awarded to him to pursue this straightforward narrative and honest story.”

Ayisha Abraham
A quiet strength resides in Zhazo’s work. His photographs have the power to draw a viewer into their reality very gradually. The people he photographs rarely look directly into the camera. Instead, they inhabit a space in the image that makes them both present and absent at the same time. It is almost as though they have the ability to disappear just as easily as they appear on the light and dark surfaces of the printed paper. Zhazo’s work conjures this magic of photography in the way he seeks out his subjects and in the way he gives them a voice without ever making a big statement.

UNSUNG Foundation gave  a grant in the memory of H Jayadeva to photgrapher Karen Dias on July 6th, 2019. Karen is currently at an MFA programme at Parsons School of Design, New York City. The award was made possible by the generous support of Jayadeva’s dear friend Mr.Anantha, senior photographer Sudhir Ramchandran, photographers Tarun Khiwal, Arjun Kartha and Ashish Chawla for their support towards the grant fund.

H. Jayadeva was a thinker, futurist and an unsung hero of Indian photography. He used to run a design agency in Bangalore called Resource Business Communication. He was a champion of photography at a time when serious photography hardly existed in India. He was the brain behind Mytec Directory of Photographers, the first volume of which was published in mid 80s. Two subsequent volumes were published in the 90s. It will be an important chapter when the history of Indian photography gets written. He had edited several photo books, quite innovative for the times.