The Rachel Tanur Prize for Visual Sociology

The Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize for Visual Sociology competition will be open for applications in August 2024.

The Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize for Visual Sociology recognizes students in the social sciences who incorporate visual analysis in their work. It is named for Rachel Dorothy Tanur (1958–2002), an urban planner and lawyer who cared deeply about people and their lives and who was an acute observer of living conditions and human relationships.

The purpose of the prize is to encourage students to work with photography as a visual medium in their study and understanding of social phenomena. The contest is open worldwide to undergraduate and graduate students in the social sciences. Students must be enrolled in their undergraduate or graduate program at the time of application. Students from diverse social science disciplines, with an interest in visual media, are encouraged to apply.

The first prize is $2,500 USD, two years of honorary Board Membership to the International Sociological Association (ISA) Visual Sociology Research Committee, and publication of the winning essay as a "picture talk feature" with an associated DOI in the journal Visual Studies. The second prize is $1,500 USD and the third prize is $500 USD. All prize winners will be awarded student membership to the ISA and the Visual Sociology Research Committee. The prize is awarded biennially.

Some of Rachel’s work is collected in the 2008 volume Visualizing Social Science: Photographs by Rachel Tanur (New York: SSRC Books). An online gallery can be viewed here.

The Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize for Visual Sociology is made possible by a generous gift from the Mark Family Fund.