Babygirl with scratches she got fighting another woman while she was in prison. Hunts Point, South Bronx 2007. Photograph by Tiana Markova-Gold from the project "you must not know 'bout me..." (Sex Workers Project / Hunts Point).

announcement of 2010 prizewinners
2010 winners: tiana markova-gold and sarah dohrmann
honorable mention awarded to kitra cahana and chris urquhart

The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University has awarded the twentieth Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize to photographer Tiana Markova-Gold and writer Sarah Dohrmann, both Americans. The $20,000 award is given to encourage collaboration in documentary work in the tradition of acclaimed American photographer Dorothea Lange and writer and social scientist Paul Taylor. Lange and Taylor worked together for many years, most notably on fieldwork that resulted in American Exodus (1941), a seminal work in documentary studies.

Tiana Markova-Gold and Sarah Dohrmann’s project, “If You Smoke Cigarettes in Public, You Are a Prostitute: Women and Prostitution in Morocco,” is an investigation of female prostitution in Morocco and the experiences of two American non-Muslim women documenting women’s lives in a country where pre-marital virginity is considered sacred. With their project, they “seek to dismantle Americans’ preconceived notions of the prostitute as sexual deviant and the hijabed woman as ‘exotic’” and examine the negotiation of relationships “between the prostitute and the society she lives in, between the artist and the subject, between non-Muslim and Muslim women, between women.”

Moroccan society greatly values “‘good’ women, which means maintaining virginity prior to marriage. In a country where men are traditionally the sole income providers, where there is no social security or welfare, where there is a 60 percent illiteracy rate and a 10 percent unemployment rate among women, a girl’s future, should she compromise her ‘purity’ before marriage, is decimated.” It is argued that many women who have lost their virginity prior to marriage “have but two choices: to become a maid or a prostitute.” Markova-Gold and Dohrmann began working on “If You Smoke Cigarettes in Public You Are a Prostitute” in October 2008. Dohrmann had been living in Morocco for over a year and writing about her interactions with prostitutes. However, it wasn’t until Markova-Gold arrived in Morocco that the project was “fully realized.” The two spent a week with two young prostituted women, as well as investigated prostitution in local cafes and clubs.

Markova-Gold and Dohrmann plan to spend three months in Morocco, “living with and documenting the lives of sex workers whose clients are not sex tourists, but are instead fellow Moroccan men.” They will focus on women in prostitution from different economic levels and backgrounds as they engage with them in their homes and in the hotels, clubs, cafes, and streets where they work. While intimate in their approach, it is their hope that the work will portray Morocco—with its unique position as a bridge between Europe and Africa, its role within the MENA region and Islamic society, and as a developing nation grappling with the economic impacts of globalization—within a larger context of the particular vulnerability of women and girls worldwide.

Of their collaboration, they say that together they “gain a different kind of access—one that allows for the cultivation of deep and nuanced relationships, resulting in a complex holistic story. By delving into the lives of Moroccan women who are working as prostitutes, and by honestly and unflinchingly answering to [our] roles as documentarians, [we] hope to reveal greater human truths about sexuality, empowerment, and choices.”

Smoking crack in the car on the way to visit Delilah in the hospital. East Harlem 2007. Photograph by Tiana Markova-Gold from the project "you must not know 'bout me . . ." (Sex Workers Project / Hunts Point).

"I think the ten minute foot rub I give is a major key to my success . . . If I were to teach Sex Work 101, this would be Lesson One and I wish I had learned it years earlier in my career." Miami Beach 2007. Photograph by Tiana Markova-Gold from the project Other People's Dirty Laundry (Sex Workers Project / Jenna).

"I remember what a sweetheart this man was. It's so unfortunate that the dynamics of power and gender would lead most people to assume something very different than what the energy actually was at the moment. It's just a picture of a very happy, sexually satisfied man buckling up his pants! Oh, and a girl who just worked him over good for a nice bit of cash." Washington DC 2008. Photograph by Tiana Markova-Gold from the project Other People's Dirty Laundry (Sex Workers Project / Jenna).

"I love to read and the quiet pleasure of being able to curl up with a good book between clients or soak in the tub is one of the reasons that I value my job so much. Miami Beach 2007. Photograph by Tiana Markova-Gold from the project Other People's Dirty Laundry (Sex Workers Project / Jenna).

"Sometimes I will spread out the cash from a few days and just look at it and touch it. Cash is an interesting physical link to our financial system that is now so symbolic. I like working with cash because it is a much more direct tie to the physicality of labor and trade. When I lived in Vegas, I had to take credit cards because most of the clientsthere use 'business' expense accounts." Washington DC 2008. Photograph by Tiana Markova-Gold from the project Other People's Dirty Laundry (Sex Workers Project / Jenna).

tiana markova-gold is a freelance documentary photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated from the Documentary Photography and Photojournalism Program at the International Center of Photography in 2007, where she received a New York Times Scholarship. She has traveled extensively, most recently in Macedonia, Brazil, and Nigeria, documenting social issues with a particular focus on women and girls. Her photographs have been recognized by Pictures of the Year International, New York Photo Awards, PDN Photo Annual, American Photography, and the International Photography Awards. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Sasha Wolf Gallery; HOST gallery in London, England; and the Lumix Festival for Young Photojournalism in Hanover, Germany. She is a 2010 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Photography.

sarah dohrmann was born and raised in Iowa, and now lives in Brooklyn, New York. She has a degree from the Graduate Writing Program in Fiction at Sarah Lawrence College, has been a writer-in-residence with Teachers & Writers Collaborative since 2001, and has taught writing in Special Programs at Sarah Lawrence College since 2003. She was a 2007–08 Fulbright Fellow of the Arts in Morocco, where she lived for fifteen months, and a 2009 Fellow in Nonfiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Dohrmann was recently awarded a 2010 Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, and she is a 2010 Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Writing Fellow. Her essays, cultural criticism, and narrative nonfiction have appeared online and in print for Bad Idea (England), Teachers & Writers, and Bad Idea: The Anthology.

honorable mention
An honorable mention was awarded to writer Chris Urquhart and photographer Kitra Cahana for their project “The Rainbow Kids,” an in-depth look at nomadic youth in North America. Their first encounter with these roaming children and teenagers was in 2009 at a National Rainbow Family Gathering in New Mexico. “The Gathering is home to a myriad of colorful characters and subcultures, including nudists, raw foodists, Christian missionaries, and ex-convicts,” they write. “We discovered that these ‘family functions’ also act as an important home base for many homeless children and teenagers—a place where free food, shelter, and familial support are doled out liberally, and where every outcast is accepted. Smaller gatherings are held throughout the year at different locations, and many young people make a career out of hitchhiking to all of them; they live on the streets between events.”

Kitra Cahana has worked as a photographic intern at the New York Times and at National Geographic. In 2007, she received a one-year scholarship to live in Treviso, Italy, and work at Fabrica, Benetton’s communications research center. In 2010, she was awarded first prize by World Press Photo for an Arts and Entertainment story for “Rainbowland,” a photo essay about the “Rainbow Kids” published in 2009 in Fabrica’s Colors magazine. She recently graduated from McGill University with a B.A. in philosophy and is pursuing an M.A. in visual and media anthropology from the Freie Universität in Berlin.

Chris Urquhart’s work has appeared in a number of publications, including Colors, the Santiago Times, Russian Esquire, and Adbusters. She has worked as an archaeologist for the city of Toronto, a kindergarten teacher in Chile, a lavender farmer on Vancouver Island, and a nude model for an art collective in Berlin. She is currently the editorial intern at Adbusters and is working as the executive editor of PRISM International. She is at work on a book about modern nomads in North America.

Past winners of the Lange-Taylor Prize have included Keith Carter, Donna DeCesare, Luis Rodriguez, Reagan Louie, Antonin Kratochvil, Mary Berridge, Ernesto Bazan, Silvana Paternostro, Deborah Luster, C. D. Wright, Rob Amberg, Jason Eskenazi, Jennifer Gould, Paola Ferrario, Mary Cappello, Dona Ann McAdams, Brad Kessler, Misty Keasler, Katherine Dunn, Jim Lommasson, Kent Haruf, Peter Brown, Larry Frolick, Donald Weber, Kurt Pitzer, Roger LeMoyne, Ilan Greenberg, Carolyn Drake, Christian Parenti, and Teru Kuwayama.

See: Announcement of previous prizewinners