While many spent the holidays shopping for presents or recovering from COVID-19 and its variants, Polly Irungu, the founder of Black Women Photographers, was combing through over 1,300 applications to a grant she had established with Nikon USA. The Black Women Photographers grant, which included $40,000 in prize money and $10,000 in gear, was to be divided among members of BWP on occasion of the community’s first anniversary.

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“I was looking at who had an obvious passion for what they were doing,” Irungu says. “I wanted to know that the gear they won, or the money they were granted, could take them to that next level of their projects.” In the end, Irungu, with the help of a judging committee that consisted of Audrey Woulard, Jessy from Jessy J Photo and Danese Kenon, the director of photography and video at The Philadelphia Inquirer, chose 12 recipients.

The biggest grant, for $10,000, went to Tiffany Sutton, a photographer based in St. Louis, Missouri, who proposed traveling to Iceland to take photographs of Black women born and raised in the northern European country. Four women won $5,000 grants, including Toni Shaw in Greensboro, North Carolina; Wanjiku Gitau in Nairobi, Kenya; Zhané Gaybyrd in Oakland, California; and Clara Watt in Geneva, Switzerland. Five women received $3,000 grants, and two women received gear kits, including camera bodies and lenses, from Nikon. (For a complete list of winners, visit the Black Women Photographers’ website.)

Gaybyrd plans on using the Black Women Photographers grant money she received to work on a photography project about the relationship between Black women and mental health. The biggest hurdle for her, she says, was finding the courage to apply to the grant at all. “My celebration was submitting the application,” she says. “I haven’t ever applied for a grant before, and I had to overcome a lot of anxiety.”

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The photo industry has largely been dominated by white voices, especially white male voices. Gaybyrd has been a photographer since 2016 (she also works for an online mental health company), and having suffered from imposter syndrome, she has struggled until now to even label herself as a photographer.

“Winning the grant meant so much to me,” she says. “It was so validating.”

For Sutton, who works as the education director at the St. Louis Artists’ Guild when she’s not taking photographs, the value of Black Women Photographers goes far beyond the grant that she won. Through the collective’s website and Instagram, Sutton has taken classes and watched tutorials on how to pitch stories, how to write a contract, and what to include when you’re pitching a story at a magazine. Other photographers seem to know this information because they learned it in college, Sutton adds, or they know someone working in the industry who showed them how. “I felt like it was so hard to get started because I didn’t know anyone,” she says.

When Sutton started taking photographs at the age of 15, she did so because she wanted to become the “Black Tarantino,” she says, but at the time she couldn’t afford a video camera. While Sutton had been inspired to create projects—one of her first was a still-photography music video, set to a Smashing Pumpkins song—she struggled to break into the professional photography world.

“You watch YouTube videos on photography, and you’re hard-pressed to see one made by a female, forget about a Black female,” Sutton says. “I’m not saying those guys don’t work hard to get where they are, but once you have a leg up or someone to help you along, you can see the next move.”

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Black Women Photographers helped Sutton see what those next moves were and how to make them. She has not only learned about working as a professional photographer, she has also been hired by editors at Buzzfeed and NPR, which has helped her build a portfolio. “I wasn’t expecting much when I joined,” Sutton says. “Education, for me, has been the total equalizer.”

Irungu notes that educational opportunities are rooted in  the platform she has created. In the coming months, she has a Q&A planned with members of Red Bull’s photography team, who will speak on what brands look for when they’re hiring photographers. She has also scheduled a session with the team that created Instagram Reels so that photographers in the Black Women Photographers network can adjust their relationship to the app to maximize exposure. Other planned workshops include fundamentals to running a photography business—lessons on budgeting, taxes and time management, for instance.

Like so many other people, Irungu found herself burned out at the beginning of 2022, but she has found a lot of respite in Black Women Photographers and its blossoming roster. “This community makes it all worthwhile,” she says.

She’s not the only one. “Ever since I joined BWP, I’ve been using the hashtag #blackwomenphotographers,” says Gaybyrd. “I’m also a black woman photographer, and I’m proud.”