The year 2010 marked the twentieth anniversary of the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor documentary prize. First announced a year after the Center's founding at Duke University, the prize was created to encourage collaboration between documentary writers and photographers in the tradition of the acclaimed photographer Dorothea Lange and writer and social scientist Paul Taylor. In 1941 Lange and Taylor published An American Exodus, a book that renders human experience eloquently in text and images and remains a seminal work in documentary studies. The Lange-Taylor Prize honors their important collaborative work by encouraging a writer and photographer working together in the early stages of a documentary project.

In 2011, in recognition of the rapidly changing environment in which documentary artists conduct their work, we are suspending the Lange-Taylor Prize competition in order to evaluate the best avenues for supporting documentary projects in the future.

This hiatus does not represent a shift in our priorities. We remain unwavering champions of collaborative, cross-media fieldwork as well as the creative brilliance of independent artistry, and we hope to develop awards that will continue to encompass the richness of these approaches.

Hand & Eye: Fifteen Years of the Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize: view photographs and writing from ten past prizewinning projects