What difference do your photographs make?

Leopard frog in the Anacostia River watershed, Washington DC metro area.
Applications are now being accepted for NANPA Foundation’s Philip Hyde Grant, a $2,500 award given annually to an individual NANPA member actively pursuing completion of a peer-reviewed environmental project featuring natural photography as a medium of communication, nature appreciation and environmental protection. Application deadline is October 31, 2017 at 11:59pm EDT.
Past recipients include:
- Paul Colangelo (2010), whose efforts to bring the remote and largely unseen Sacred Headwaters of British Columbia to the attention of lawmakers and citizens outside of the Tahltan First Nation played a key role in vacating Shell Oil Company from a million acres slated for methane development
- Amy Gulick (2008), whose award-winning book Salmon in the Trees, traveling exhibits, lectures and YouTube videos tell a hopeful story of Alaska’s Tongass rain forest, a rare ecosystem where salmon grow trees and support an abundance of bears and bald eagles
- C.C. Lockwood (2008), whose photographs showcase disappearing swamplands that threatened the culture and economy of Louisiana, as featured in the PBS documentary Atchafalaya Houseboat
- David Herasimtschuk (2014), who is working to equip conservation professionals and educators with the imagery necessary to illustrate the beauty and value of freshwater biodiversity in Southern Appalachia and to document the human activities threatening the region
- Krista Schlyer (2016) and her The Anacostia Project bringing involved parties together with photography and visual storytelling to make changes to the Anacostia River – a waterway in Washington, D.C. that has become “the forgotten river” and one of the country’s most denuded river ecosystems due to deforestation, agricultural and urban runoff, and toxic industry.
As applicants for the Philip Hyde Grant, these photographers successfully demonstrated the ways in which their still photographs would make a difference to specific decision-makers wrestling with a timely issue. Additionally, at the time of application, these projects were already well underway, with established collaborations, realistic schedules and practical budgets. These factors made for compelling applications that fared well in scoring.
For complete guidelines, link to the online application and additional tips for applicants, please visit http://nanpafoundation.org/philip-hyde-environmental-grant/.
The inaugural Philip Hyde Environmental Grant was awarded in 1999. It was established in honor of Philip Hyde, recipient of NANPA’s 1996 Lifetime Achievement Award.
Although he studied under Ansel Adams, Minor White and Edward Weston, Hyde describes his work as evolving past the hard and fast definitions of his early training. “I am not interested in pretty pictures for postcards. I feel better if I just get a few people to see something they haven’t seen before,” writes Hyde.
The Philip Hyde Environmental Grant honors this spirit, supporting photographers who clearly document in application materials the ways in which their projects reach influential people—not necessarily the mass public—and challenge them to discover something new about an imminent environmental issue.
Hyde, whose photograph “Cathedral in the Desert, Glen Canyon, Utah, 1964” was named one of the top 100 photographs of the 20th Century by American Photo magazine, played a key role in protecting Dinosaur National Monument, the Grand Canyon, the Coast Redwoods, Point Reyes, King’s Canyon, Canyon de Chelly, the North Cascades, Canyonlands, the Wind Rivers, Big Sur and many other National Parks and wilderness areas.

A bald eagle on the Anacostia River, Washington DC.