How to Write a Photography Grant
Writing persuasively to bring photo projects to life.
You’re reading Depth of Field, a newsletter about making a life in photography and beyond.
“So, how is your… photography going?” is a question I am often asked at parties, and one that feels laden with the expectation that whatever I say next will naturally involve a camera. People tend to look surprised to hear a response like “Oh, it’s great, I’ve been writing captions this week,” or “Right now I’m applying for a grant.”
A persistent myth about professional photography is that taking pictures is the majority of what photographers do. While social media may give an impression of constant high adventure, always off to the next exciting project—an illusion I, too, participate in, for valid marketing reasons—an enormous amount of unseen work happens between these projects. Since much of my photography does involve adventurous travel, which can be expensive, seeking project funding is a big part of my life when I’m not in the field. My favorite way to do this is by applying for grants.
Grantwriting is probably the most foundational skill, second to photography itself, that has allowed me to center my photo career largely around passion projects. Over the past 12 years, I have been fortunate to receive grants from Fulbright, Canon, the Save Our Seas Foundation, and the National Geographic Society. These grants have funded travel to remote places, resulting in work that has been published, exhibited, and formed the basis of my portfolio. The best part? Unlike assignments, photographers typically retain full creative control over their grant work.
To my surprise, writing grants has also become a process I genuinely enjoy. It forces me to distill shimmering ideas into clear and feasible plans. It helps me clarify what I am doing and why. Even if I don’t win, a finished grant proposal is a fantastic roadmap for a new project, greatly increasing the odds that I will find another way to get it funded.
Today, in the spirit of transparency, I’m sharing exactly how I do this. If you’ve ever wanted to apply for project funding, but aren’t sure where to start, read on.
How Grants Work
Grants are a major source of funding in the art world. Now, as editorial budgets decline and newsrooms close, they are becoming more important in photojournalism as well. Read the fine print at the end of magazine articles, and you may notice long-form stories supported by grants from the Pulitzer Center, the National Geographic Society, or the Alexia Foundation.
Photography grants can come from foundations, non-profits, brands, and other organizations that fund visual arts and photography. Typically, they award money to fund the production of new work or the completion of a project-in-progress. Winning a grant can attract attention from editors, galleries, and other industry professionals, making them particularly useful during early or transitional career stages.
When you have a dream project clearly in mind, the first step is to identify a grant that is a good fit for your project. Take time to research the grant organization, its mission, its previous winners, and the types of work it is intended to fund. When you find a good match, prepare to give the process plenty of time.1
The Photography Grant Application
When you write a grant, you are competing with other photographers for project funding.2 Most applications include a grant proposal, a budget, a photo portfolio3, and a CV or personal statement.
The written proposal is the heart of the application, and for visual thinkers, it can be the hardest part. In a concise page or two4, you must convince the grant committee that your project absolutely must be funded, that you are the best person to receive this money, and if they give it to you, you will make them proud.
While there are undoubtedly many creative, original ways to approach this, I have a formula that I use as a starting point for all my documentary photography proposals. Here it is.
A Photography Project Proposal in Five Parts
Evocative intro. Set the scene for the story and its context, assuming the reader has zero familiarity with the subject matter. Vividly introduce the key story elements—the who, what, when, where, and why—using language that sets the emotional tone for the project. End this first paragraph with urgency: a sense of why this project needs to be done now, vs. any other time.
Dig into the facts and backstory as you build a case for the project’s value. Why should an audience care about this project as much as you do? Back up the importance of the story with compelling research, data, or statistics.
Describe your project in detail. Explain exactly what you plan to do and how you plan to do it—from your visual approach to your choice of materials, to your logistics, timeline, and the project outcome. Describe any existing collaborations, partnerships, or plans for community engagement. Be as specific as possible about your project results, ie. “a final series of 20-30 photos”, or “a 10-minute film.”
Explain why you are the right person for this project. Your resumé, background, career stage, and portfolio5 should position you as the ideal photographer for what you are proposing. (Just try to let this shine through without making things too much about you—one Alexia grant reviewer reports resisting proposals that use “I” or “me” more than about three times!)
Describe the specific outcome of your project and how it will align with the goals of the grant organization. Think creatively about the possible results of the project and your plans for distributing it. Who is actually your target audience? (It’s easy to say “everyone!” and dream of a high-profile magazine or gallery, but effective target audiences are often more specific.) How will your photos live a robust life out in the world?
How to Edit a Proposal
When I begin the very first draft of any grant proposal, I try to write freely into the categories above, brainstorming wildly, without judgment. The goal is to get as much onto the pages as possible, sans concerns about length or clarity.
From there, I like to edit in a series of drafts, refining and chiseling away towards the word-count limit until every sentence carries information, substance, and weight. This process in itself can be sort of magical, not unlike watching a photo develop in a darkroom tray.
Editing rounds I like include:
Removing any repeting ideas, statements, and word choices. No redundancy!
Removing passive language.
Fact-checking. Important! Consult legitimate sources, not AI.
Re-organizing the flow of information to fit the application requirements.
Removing jargon, vagueness, “art-speak,” and any other lofty language that doesn’t actually mean anything. Be crystal-clear and cut the rest.
Improving clarity and flow. Read it aloud and break up any sentences that are too long.
When I’ve got a legible draft, I send the proposal to trusted readers for feedback (and give them plenty of time to respond). I particularly value input from non-photographers, who can help me see beyond the scope of my particular vocational bubble.
Also, between each draft, take breaks! Creativity likes breathing room. Some of my absolute best moments of grantwriting have occurred while walking in the woods or taking a shower. It’s a cliché for a reason.
Finally, you knew this was coming: give yourself a healthy time buffer to submit before the final deadline. (No one likes to lose an entire submission to insufficient internet speed at the last minute, like I embarrassingly did last winter.)
Some Sanity-Saving Grant Advice
For each time I have won a grant, there are many more times I have unwittingly blundered through the grant process on a speedy path to rejection, usually with too much enthusiasm and too little time. Even with a strong application, I know I will statistically not be funded 90% of the time, so it’s best to take things lightly.
Here are a few more things I have learned along the way.
Do your research.
Nothing is more important than researching the grant opportunity to learn precisely who and what they fund! If your project isn’t a fit, don’t waste your time. If it’s almost a fit, or has a good amount of overlap, ask yourself if you can tweak your proposal to better align with the grant’s goals while staying true to your project.
Also, research your project topic and all the work that has ever been done on it before. What makes your approach unique? Can you leverage this past work and its findings to strengthen your own proposal?
Keep it realistic.
There is an enormous temptation to go overboard, promising a huge and sparkly project far beyond the scope of the grant. Instead, aim for feasibility. While “underpromise and overdeliver” sounds unglamorous at the proposal stage, it becomes tremendously satisfying once the project is done.
Budget comfortably.
This is about funding, after all. Thoroughly research your project’s costs, and make sure you won’t be cutting corners. Doing a project more cheaply does not necessarily make your proposal stronger!
Plan for inflation, plan for miscellaneous surprise costs, and plan for taxes, specifically for the tax bracket you will be in if you win the grant. (You can guess how I learned that). If the grant allows for it, pay yourself a standard day rate.
Only propose a project you really want to do, not just one you think will win.
For some people, writing a grant can become a game of seeking approval from the grant committee, rather than a proposal that comes from the heart. It’s normal for the elation of winning a grant to be followed by a wave of trepidation—*gulp*, now I actually have to do it!—but these should be excited jitters, not an oppressive sense of obligation.
This is one of the rarest career opportunities to fund a genuine passion project. Use it to the fullest!
If the odds of winning a photography grant sound competitive, it’s because they are. But grant writing is a skill worth practicing because it can be transferred to other competitive areas of life. I have used these same persuasive writing skills to pitch photo stories to magazines, secure full funding for my master’s degree, and purchase a house with a lower offer than other bidders. Each grant application you write makes you more likely to succeed on your next proposal, whatever it may be for.
So go out there and give it your best shot. Trust your project, trust your authenticity, and let it shine through. I hope this was helpful. Good luck out there. ✦
Grant Resources Galore:
How to Win a Photography Grant, featuring interviews with three industry leaders and three winning photographers - and examples of what worked for them.
A webinar on How To Apply for Grants with Sarah Terry and Raymond Thompson, including a discussion about the photo portfolio component.
PetaPixel’s list of Photography Grants and Scholarships
A list of photography grant opportunities for nature, wildlife and conservation
If you’re keen to develop your grant-writing skills even further, I recommend the book How to Write a Grant by my friend Meredith Noble, who teaches a grantwriters collective called Learn Grantwriting. While not photography-specific, the book is concise, useful, and very easy to read.
I may be a perfectionist, but for reference: writing a Fulbright grant in 2013 took about 6 months of consistent, weekly work with an editor that my college miraculously employed for this purpose. Writing a National Geographic Society grant in 2022, which has a particularly detailed application, took me about 3 weeks of full-time-ish work.
There is a part of me that wishes this weren’t true, but alas. I also want my friends to win!
This is a whole separate topic, but in brief: Strongest Photos Only.
The length varies by application - Pulitzer Center grants can only be 250 words! In my experience, the shorter the text, the more work it takes to get it just right.
Hint: update your website!
Thank you so much for sharing this wealth of knowledge!!
What interesting insight to some of your behind-the-scenes work. Cool!