About the Grant
Shared Ecologies, a program by the Shyama Foundation, invites applications from photographers responding to ecological conditions. The year-long Shared Ecologies Photo Grant will support a successful applicant towards the completion of an ongoing project or for the production of a new body of work. The grant will also facilitate interactions or feedback sessions with mentor(s) as required by the project during the grant period. Please read more about the scope of the grant below. 

The term ‘ecology’ can now be read in an expanded field with pedagogical, historical, cultural and social underpinnings. The increasing depletion of biodiversity and forest cover, rising pollution and environmental toxicity, governmental and private encroachment over indigenous land, displacement of communities and exploitation of natural resources has become a structural condition of our times. Natural science tells us that earth system boundaries are being transgressed drastically in terms of species loss or climate change, and where older top-down approaches are failing to generate a sustained effort.

In such times, the idea of the ‘local,’ can be thought of as one which contains the ‘planetary,’ and vice versa. It leads to viewpoints of heterogeneous ecological touchpoints, which are entangled with a variety of conditions. Visualising the idea of nature afresh as a means of resurgence can be a way forward. As termed by the American anthropologist Anna L Tsing, resurgence is a process of regeneration and renewal after (ecological) destruction. Tsing uses the example of regrowth after a forest fire, a process undertaken by many organisms in negotiative, hyperlocal multispecies networks.

 This Shared Ecologies grant invites proposals for photography projects grounded in research-based practices, and which attempt to (re)locate, reorient, reconstitute, revitalise strategies and narratives within localised or overarching conditions, using photography as a primary, but not necessarily only, medium. 
Experimental approaches are also welcome.
Keywords for reference: Lens, camera, image, vision, environment, ecology, nature, sight, conservation, staging, climate, clime, Anthropocene, picture, biodiversity, pollution, diverse, heterogenous, contamination, footprint, natural landscape, crisis, seed, extraction, terrain, sustainability, regeneration, compost, endangered, strata, harvest, resurgence, cultivation, foraging, forest, field etc.

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