• Robert Giard Foundation •
• Deadline: Jan 24th, 2022 •
• Prize: $10,000 + Exposure •
• Theme: LGBTQ+ Photographers •
• Entry Fees: $12 •
• REGISTRATION: CLOSED, Click HERE For More Opportunities •
The Robert Giard Foundation was formed immediately after Robert Giard’s death in 2002, with the goal of preserving his photographic legacy so that the full breadth of his work across genres – the portrait, nude, still life, and landscape – would be accessible to a growing audience.
The Robert Giard Foundation promotes the use of Giard’s work for educational purposes, and supports continued scholarship about LGBTQ+ literature in America, as well as LGBTQ+ movements and activism more generally. Giard’s photographs bear witness to LGBTQ+ lives, friendships, and histories, reflecting changing understandings of what it means to be gay, lesbian, queer, and more. By supporting public programming and exhibitions of Giard’s work, the Foundation shares LGBTQ+ literature, art, and culture with the wider public, continuing Giard’s project of sharing our communities’ particular voices.
The Giard archive at the Beinecke Library, Yale University, preserves Giard’s work for use by scholars and the public. It contains more than 1,500 unique vintage prints, 7,800 related work prints, and extensive correspondence, records, diaries and other papers, many of which are available online.
In 2008, the Foundation launched a yearly fellowship of $7500 for emerging LGBTQ+ photographers and video artists in cooperation with the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Past awards have supported multimedia and film projects as well as photography-based projects, from the USA to Colombia and the Philippines.
In 2019, the Foundation, in partnership with Queer|Art, relaunched this award as The Robert Giard Grant for Emerging LGBTQ+ Photographers, to support future generations of self-taught, early career, activist, or otherwise emerging photographers illuminating aspects of gender and sexuality in their work. This grant supports one emerging LGBTQ+ photographer working anywhere in the world with a yearly grant of $10,000 (and a grant to the runner up of $5000). Through The Robert Giard Grant for Emerging Photographers, the Foundation hopes to extend Giard’s legacy by encouraging current and future generations to document, depict, and interrogate past and present LGBTQ+ cultures.
The Robert Giard Grant for Emerging LGBTQ+ Photographers promotes new work by self-taught, early-career, or otherwise emerging LGBTQ+ artists whose projects address issues of sexuality, gender, or LGBTQ+ identity. The grant is administered in partnership with Queer|Art, and awards two prizes each year, $10,000 for the winner and $5,000 for the runner-up. This grant provides vital support for emerging artists, who may lack the financial resources or institutional support available to more established artists.
Apply for the grant until January 24, 2022 or donate to support the work of emerging LGBTQ+ photographers, helping us to extend Robert Giard’s legacy by encouraging current and future generations to document, depict, and interrogate past and present LGBTQ+ cultures.
The Robert Giard Foundation has awarded this grant, previously known as The Robert Giard Fellowship, every year since 2008. Until 2018, the fellowship supported film, photography and mixed media by LGBTQ+ artists and was administered through the Centre for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York. Past recipients include photographers and filmmakers from Colombia, the Philippines, and the United States. “Photography is par excellence a medium expressive of our mortality, holding up, as it does, one time for the contemplation of another time. This motif infuses all portrait photography with a special poignancy. It is my wish that tomorrow, when a viewer looks into the eyes of the subjects of these pictures, he or she will say in a spirit of wonder, ‘These people were here; like me, they lived and breathed.’ So too will the portraits respond, ‘We were here; we existed. This is how we were.’” —Robert Giard