After a Denied Abortion

Members of the jury for the 2025 FotoEvidence W Award includes: Rehab Eldalil, Maria Mann, Lauren Walsh, Evgenia Maximova and Svetlana Bachevanova.

FotoEvidence is proud to announce that the jury has selected Stacy Kranitz as the laureate of the 2025 FotoEvidence W Awar and her project After a Denied Abortion will be published in a book.

Three photographers were selected as finalists:

Iva Sidash with Seeing the Unseen
Laila Nahar with The Crescent Moon
Sanna Mattoo with Good Story but Bad Narrative

The 2025 award called for work addressing the alarming rise of the right-wing populism across the globe and its threat to r hard-won progress for women, LGBTQI+ and other marginalized communities.

Stacy Kranitz lives in Tennessee, where almost all abortions are banned but where few resources are devoted to providing security for children once they are born. After a Denied Abortion follows Mayron Hollis, a recovering addict, who faced a life-threatening pregnancy but was not able to obtain an abortion. Her daughter Elayna was one of the first babies born after a denied abortion, following the overturning of Roe vs. Wade by the Supreme Court.

Kranitz followed Mayron and her daughter Elayna for a year, knowing the challenges they would face with Mayron's history with the child welfare and criminal justice systems, her history of addiction, her family's precarious finances, and Tennessee's poor outcomes for maternal health, infant mortality, and child poverty. She also knew that Elayna, born prematurely, would require significant ongoing medical care. The resulting visual story shows how one family's personal lived experience reveals many gaps in the social safety net in a post-Roe state, where abortions are not available.

"They forced me, basically, to have a child," Mayron said of the state after the abortion ban. But then, "they didn't help me take care of that child."

The FotoEvidence Women Award is devoted to engaged identifying as women photographers who want to tell their personal stories in the form of a photo book.

The 2025 FotoEvidence W Award seeks to highlight work addressing the alarming rise of the right-wing populism across the globe, threatening to roll back hard-won progress for women, LGBTQI+ and other marginalized communities. This movement often pushes for traditional gender roles, opposes reproductive rights, resists equal pay, and challenges self-expression, undermining the fight for equality and inclusion.

The 2025 FotoEvidence W Award is a rallying cry for women photographers to confront this urgent global threat. Through powerful storytelling, we seek to illuminate what’s at stake if we fail to stand up for women’s rights against these regressive forces.

Now is the time to act. Share your vision. Tell the stories that need to be told. Be part of the fight for justice and equality.

The FotoEvidence W Award for Personal Story will be granted by an international jury to one identifying as woman photographer whose work merits a book. The hardbound book will be published by FotoEvidence.

SUBMISSION PERIOD: November 1st, 2024- March 25, 2025 Submissions are now closed.

The jury reserves the right to not award a grant in any given year if they determine that no candidate has met the criteria. The jury for the W Award 2025 will be announced in May, 2025.

The winner of The  W Award will be announced  at the FotoEvidence website.

- The W Award is open to all adult women photographers.
- Submit a lowres PDF of the work already developed as a book concept to fotoevidence@fotoevidence.com . If you are selected for the award, you will be asked to submit 60-80 photographs on the same topic
- Submission fee: donation of $20. Contributions collected during the submission process support the production of the winning book. Please include in your application letter a reference number of your donation. Make a donation here.

Jury members do not know who has contributed and who has not.

The W Award is governed by FotoEvidence Association terms and conditions. Please review the terms and conditions before submitting. During the submission process you will be asked to confirm that you have read and agreed to the terms and conditions.

- A lowres PDF of the work if it is already developed as a book concept with your statement of up to 1500 words about the work sent to: fotoevidence@fotoevidence.com

- A short text how do you envision the book.
- Resume/CV
- Entry fee: donation of $20. Contributions collected during the submission process support the production of the winning book. You can also choose to support us by purchasing a book from the previous recipients of the W Award: The Stranger Whose Path Has Been Broken by Rehab Eldalil, La Puente by Charlotte Schmitz and The Eyes of Earth by Solmaz Daryani.

All applications should be based on a long-term projects and should reflect the personal experince of the photographer. All photographic media are accepted.

Photographers may submit more than one portfolio. A separate application is required for each entry.

Please check the box that indicates you have read and agreed to the terms and conditions

For questians contact: Andrea at  fotoevidence@fotoevidence.com 

Submissions for the 2025 W Award are now closed.

The winner of the W Award will be announced in May 2025 at the FotoEvidence Association website.

All published images will be credited with the photographer’s name. Copyright and ownership of photographs remain with the photographer/photographers at all times. Entrants agree to grant FotoEvidence permission to use submitted work for promotional purposes in any electronic media, printed materials, or advertising, to be reproduced in newspapers and magazines (printed and electronic) solely for the purpose of promoting the work, the photographer, FotoEvidence Association and The W Award. 

The W Award prize winner(s) agree to the publication of their photographs as FotoEvidence hard bound books under the terms of the FotoEvidence book contract.

FotoEvidence Association team will collaborate with the photographer on editorial decisions in the development and publication of the book. Photographers will receive 25 complimentary copies of the book.

FotoEvidence Association reserves the right to reject entries that are not submitted properly. Submissions should come directly from artists or organizations. No exceptions will be made for late submissions.
The jury reserves the right to not award a grant in any given year if they determine that no candidate has met the criteria.

Questions:
fotoevidence@fotoevidence.com

The goal of FotoEvidence is to offer a worldwide platform for photographers dedicated to the pursuit of human rights. FotoEvidence promotes the work it publishes through partner festivals and photography centers in the USA and Europe, actively working together with our artists to support their careers.
To help the W Award winner tell their stories, FotoEvidence pairs the photographer with a photo editor and a book designer, in an educational and creative process to both realize their vision and produce a powerful book.