Walkley-winning photographer Stephen Dupont has won a $US50,000 fellowship from Harvard to document communities in Papua New Guinea. He says he's had to move into academia because there's so little magazine work on offer for photographers.
Walkley-winning photographer Stephen Dupont is the first Australian to win a prestigious Robert Gardner Fellowship from Harvard University, worth $US50,000.
Dupont will head to Papaua New Guinea to document the impacts of globalisation on a traditionally tribal society, in street photography, landscapes, portraiture and video grabs.
The results will be exhibited through the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, online and in a book with the Peabody Muesum Press.
PNG has been a fascination with Dupont in recent years – he has been taking photographs there for the past six years.
With the support of the fellowship Dupont will spend a year working on a project called “Guns and Arrows: The Detribalisation of Papua New Guinea”.
Dupont was a finalist for Daily Life photography in the 2009 Walkley Awards, for his series of images from Port Moresby - click here to view a gallery of his Walkley nominated work.
The move to academia from freelance press photography – Dupont has been published in Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and TIME Magazine, among others – is symptomatic of the worrying decline in media outlets for photographers.
Dupont told The Australian “To win this money in a dying industry not having magazines and the usual avenues to publish in is a real bonus.
“It’s not as easy as it was, or as profitable, so I’m finding other ways to do the work that I’ve done. I guess I’ve been moving into academic circles because I feel I can spend long periods of time on projects and get professional reward at the end of it with the kind of exposure or heft an institution like the Peabody Museum gives it.”
