© Isadora Kosofsky from "The Three," 2012

2012 Inge Morath Award Announced

2012 Inge Morath Award Winner Announced

The Inge Morath Foundation and the The Magnum Foundation are pleased to announce the recipient of the 2012 Inge Morath Award.

Each June, the winner of the Inge Morath Award is selected by the full membership of Magnum Photos, and the Director of the Inge Morath Foundation, during the annual Magnum meeting. The Award of $5,000 is given by the Magnum Foundation, in cooperation with the IM Foundation, to a female photographer under the age of 30, to support the completion of a long-term documentary project. The recipient of the 2012 Inge Morath Award is Isadora Kosofsky (US), for her proposal Selections from “The Three” and “This Existence.” The finalists for the IM Award were Maria Pleshkova (RU), for her project Days of War: A Pillowbook, and Carlotta Zarattini (IT), for her project The White Building.

Kosofsky is 18 years old, and began her work with the elderly after the death of her grandmother, who raised her. “Grief following my grandmother’s death led me to document the lives and relationships of the elderly, particularly women, in Los Angeles over the course of four years,” Kosofsky writes. She will use the Award to continue that project, and also to expand it. “I seek to further develop my documentation, and The Inge Morath Award will permit me to do so. I wish to not only expand my existing narratives but also to document the elderly in France, a different cultural setting.”

Isadora Kosofsky’s winning proposal will be presented in full in IM Magazine, the web-based publication of the Inge Morath Foundation, in September, 2012, followed by the proposals of the finalists, Maria Pleshkova and Carlotta Zarattini. Kosofsky’s project “The Three” was featured in Le Monde in June 2012, and on TIME Lightbox in May. She was nominated in 2010 for the prize for “Single Editorial Image,” and in 2009 for “Social Documentary Essay,” at the 2010 New York Photo Festival. Kosofsky also founded the Photo-dialectic therapy: Photographic Documentation Project, at the Los Angeles Ronald McDonald House, to engage chronically ill children and their families through photography. The program was in operation from 2008 – 10.