FIRST WINNER OF RPS WALL GRANT – DIANA MARKOSIAN.

Our very first grantee for the Reminders Photography Stronghold Wall Grant has been selected and is to be awarded to Armenian documentary photographer Diana Markosian. Congratulations!!

©DIANA MARKOSIAN / REPORTAGE BY GETTY IMAGES EMERGING TALENT

We will be posting comments and thoughts from each of our four judges, Svetlana Bachevanova, Marc Prüst, Manik Katyal and Eliseo Barbàra on the over 70 submissions we received in the Winter of 2012.

Her project, “Goodbye My Chechnya” touched on how for young women in Chechnya, just rumors of a couple engaging in pre-martial relations is enough to get a girl killed. Modern-day Chechnya is going through Islamic revival, the government have been building mosques in every village.

©DIANA MARKOSIAN / REPORTAGE BY GETTY IMAGES EMERGING TALENT

The project chronicles the lives of young Muslim girls who have witnessed two wars and are now coming of age in that is rapidly redefining itself as a Muslim state.An exhibition of her work will be held at the Reminders Photography Stronghold Gallery in Tokyo in Mid-April 2013. More details on that soon.

Diana Markosian’s Biography:
Documentary photographer and writer, her reporting has taken her from Russia’s North Caucasus mountains, to the ancient Silk Road in Tajikistan and overland to the remote Wakhan Corridor in northeastern Afghanistan. She holds a masters from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Markosian’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Sunday Times Magazine, Foreign Policy, Foto8, Time.com, The London Times, Boston Globe, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, amongst others.
http://www.dianamarkosian.com/