J-School Dominates Dorothea Lange Photography Fellowship Awards

For the 11th straight year, the UC Berkeley School of Journalism scored a clean sweep of one of the University’s most prestigious grants, named after a legendary documentary photographer of the 20th century, Dorothea Lange.

The three winners of the Dorothea Lange Fellowships were J-School students Bonnie Chan (’16) and Shawn Baldwin (’16) and Assistant Professor Richard “Koci” Hernandez, a photojournalist who is a mainstay of the School’s New Media Program.

The fellowships, created in 1981 by Lange’s late husband, Paul S. Taylor, were established to encourage those within the UC Berkeley graduate community to use photography in their scholarly work. The competition is open to all Berkeley graduate students and faculty.

Dorothea Lange’s specialty was humanizing both the disenfranchised and the issues they grappled with during the Great Depression, and she is renowned for a series of photographs on behalf of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Farm Security Administration (FSA), which aimed to fight rural poverty. “The Migrant Mother,” a 1936 image that captured an agricultural laborer named Florence Thompson and her seven children in a tent in Nipomo, Calif., is probably Lange’s most widely known work.

Professor Ken Light, head of the J-School’s photojournalism program and chair of the committee for the Dorothea Lange Fellowship, said he was pleased to be able to call the winners and tell them the good news.

“That’s always fun,” Light said. “Having received the fellowship [in 1987], I know the experience of having someone call you and say you’re getting money to do your project. Partly, you’re always feeling like maybe the work’s not good enough and there are probably better people, so it’s just nice to kind of shock them.”

Bonnie Chan, 33, certainly wasn’t expecting the award when she received the call from Light.

“I figured Ken was calling about something that happened in photo class that I needed to do,” said Chan, who received $3,000.

Chan, a Bay Area native, submitted a series of photos she took at a conference in Chiapas, Mexico, in 2008 organized by an indigenous revolutionary group of women who were part of the Zapatista movement. (EZLN). The Zapatistas, who’ve been in resistance against the Mexican state since the early 1990s, held an encuentro (gathering) to meet with people from around the world who were not part of the EZLN, to share their stories and visions for education, healthcare, ecological sustainability and justice.

The issue of “justice” resurfaced as one of Chan’s themes in her work when she presented a proposal to photograph San Quentin State Prison’s ROOTS program (“Restoring Our Original True Selves.”)

The program targets Asian and Pacific Islander inmates, and an outside organization brings in guest speakers who can discuss aspects of Asian and Pacific Islander culture.

“It helps both the inmates in prison reconnect to their roots and also helps to reduce recidivism for the inmates who will eventually get paroled,” Chan said.

Shawn Baldwin, 45, who won a $4,000 scholarship, submitted a portfolio of photos conveying the turmoil in Iraq. He took the photos as a freelance photographer between 2003 and 2005.

Baldwin is now in the planning stages of a month-long Central Valley project, which he will conduct during the harvest next summer and will attempt to capture how the water crisis affects migrant workers.

“The fellowship is such a great opportunity to work on a long form project,” said the New Jersey native, 45. “Obviously being attached to [Lange], someone I’ve admired since I started in photography, is huge.”

Prof. Hernandez, 46, received a $1,000 honorable mention for his work capturing gentrification in Oakland. He said his objective was to act as a mirror, conveying the changes that have taken place in the town so that decades from now, observers will be able to view the differences between then and now.

By the time Chan and Baldwin are fully underway with their projects, next year’s fellowship applicants will have started putting their portfolios together.

Applicants are required to present five to seven photographic prints in either black and white or color and a 200″Ò400 word proposal explaining their visions for their documentary projects. Each student applicant must also submit a letter of recommendation from a faculty member who will act as project supervisor.

Once the project is complete, a 250-word summary of the project must be submitted, along with two archival prints ready for donation to the Bancroft Library and six digital or print images for the Fellowship’s website.

A workshop intended to answer questions and assist applicants with their portfolios will be held in the fall.

Details concerning image sizes, deadlines, and contact information can be found at the Dorothea Lange Fellowship website.

Light hopes next year’s applicants will take his advice to heart.

“Do a very tight edit of the photographs, make sure you feel strongly about each photograph, have some sort of sequence, and have a consistency in the visual image,” he says. “The most important thing is to get the best quality and the most powerful photographs you can get.”

By Agatha Kereere (’17)