After presenting the recipients of the 2017 W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund in Humanistic Photography awards on October 18, 2017 (Daniel Garcia Castro, Edmund Clark and Alex Majoli), The Eye of Photography joins the organization and features the works of the prize finalists.
I would like to use funds from a Gene Smith Grant to visually examine how overfishing is threatening the food supply of one of the world’s poorest communities as it strips mines our oceans of marine life. The past decade has seen a rapid expansion of industrial fishing, with international fleets of mega-trawlers, super-seiners, and factory mother ships competing with a similarly increasing number of small artisanal fishing boats trying to maintain the food supply for some of the world’s poorest communities. The combination of these competing forces is rapidly emptying our oceans of wildlife. Ground zero for this fishing conflict is on the coast of West Africa, particularly in Senegal, Mauritania, and the Canary Islands.
This work in West Africa is an expansion of the Feed the Planet, project that I began four years ago, to examine how we are going to double the world’s food supply by 2050, to cope with population growth from 7 to 9 billion and increasing demand for protein in the rapidly developing parts of the world. I have funded large parts of this project with assignments for National Geographic, GEO, Le Figaro, Vogue, and The New York Times Magazine, and hope that I can place this new work in West Africa in influential publications where it will call attention to this under-reported global issue.
George Steinmetz
Best known for his exploration photography, George Steinmetz has a restless curiosity for the unknown: remote deserts, obscure cultures, the mysteries of science and technology. A regular contributor to National Geographic and GEO Magazines, he has explored subjects ranging from the remotest stretches of Arabia’s Empty Quarter to the unknown tree people of Irian Jaya.
