The year 2010 marked the twentieth anniversary of the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor documentary prize. First announced a year after the Center's founding at Duke University, the prize was created to encourage collaboration between documentary writers and photographers in the tradition of the acclaimed photographer Dorothea Lange and writer and social scientist Paul Taylor. In 1941 Lange and Taylor published An American Exodus, a book that renders human experience eloquently in text and images and remains a seminal work in documentary studies. The Lange-Taylor Prize honors their important collaborative work by encouraging a writer and photographer working together in the early stages of a documentary project.

In 2011, in recognition of the rapidly changing environment in which documentary artists conduct their work, we suspended the Lange-Taylor Prize competition in order to evaluate the best avenues for supporting documentary projects in the future.

This year, the Center for Documentary Studies is proud to re-launch the Lange-Taylor Prize, which supports documentary artists who are involved in extended, ongoing fieldwork projects that rely on and exploit, in intriguing and effective ways, the interplay of words and images in the creation and presentation of their work. The updated deadlines will require that an artist’s fieldwork has already started, and will expand the idea of “writing” to allow words to be represented by audio (alone, in sound slides, in video). In addition, the new prize guidelines will no longer stipulate that a writer and a photographer, i.e., two people or more, collaborate on a project; single artists working with text/audio/video may apply, though collaborative teams will still be eligible.

These changes to the award are inspired in part by the Center for Documentary Studies’ commitment to the new Master of Fine Arts in Experimental and Documentary Arts at Duke University, which brings together two forms of artistic activity—the documentary approach and experimental production in analog, digital, and computational media. This unique program fosters collaborations across disciplines and media as it trains sophisticated, creative art practitioners. The philosophy of the program is guided by a belief in the intersection of personal artistic work with interpretive knowledge and of the relevance of the individual documentary/experimental artist within the cultural history and life of communities. A key component to the program is the notion of creative engagement through the arts and the role of the artist in society.

The Center for Documentary Studies will continue to make awards for documentary still photography and narrative nonfiction through the CDS Documentary Essay Prize.

The winner will receive $10,000, a solo exhibition at the Center for Documentary Studies, and inclusion in the Archive of Documentary Arts at Rubenstein Library, Duke University.

Guidelines available in late August 2012

Submissions accepted in January and February 2013

Hand & Eye: Fifteen Years of the Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize: view photographs and writing from ten past prizewinning projects