Flickr and Black Women Photographers have reopened their annual grant with a $10,000 grand prize, the largest award the partnership has offered so far. The winner will also receive a two-year Flickr Pro membership and a one-year SmugMug Pro membership, and the recipient will be announced at MODE by Flickr in Minneapolis, scheduled for September 18-20.
The grant is aimed at a Black female or non-binary photographer, which puts real money behind the kind of long-form personal work that often gets pushed aside by client jobs and day rates. Black Women Photographers says its broader mission is to increase visibility, community and global reach for Black and African women photographers, and the grant sits inside that system rather than standing alone as a one-off check.
That matters in a field where access is usually the bottleneck. Black Women Photographers says its network now includes more than 2,100 Black and African creatives across more than 60 countries and 35 U.S. states, with support that includes educational workshops, events, portfolio reviews, grants and other professional connections. In other words, the prize is not just funding a project, it is plugging a photographer into a network that can help refine the work and get it seen.
The partnership also has a visible track record. The group says Eleonore Menga, a Montreal-based portrait and documentary photographer, received the 2025 BWP x Flickr $5,000 grant. Genesis Falls, a contemporary portrait photographer in Chicago, won the 2023 BWP x Flickr $2,500 grant. The jump to $10,000 makes this cycle the most valuable version of the award yet.
Black Women Photographers, founded by Polly Irungu in July 2020, says it has awarded more than $230,000 in financial grants since then and also provided an additional $80,000 in camera equipment to members. Flickr’s MODE festival, set for September 18-20, 2026, in Minneapolis, is described as a three-day photography festival centered on art, experimentation and community, which gives the grant announcement a fitting stage: not a product pitch, but a public handoff to the next photographer who needs both money and reach to finish the work.
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