Money raised from the inaugural Paul Lowe Challenge is funding the launch of a new residency to support photojournalists working in conflict.
The Paul Lowe Residency opens at The VII Foundation’s Sarajevo campus in late October 2026, and its first recipient will be a Ukrainian photojournalist.
The residency runs for a month and takes a different approach from most support for war photographers. Rather than funding more time in the field, it funds time out of it. The program gives a working photojournalist accommodation, a dedicated workspace, and access to high-end printing facilities in Sarajevo, along with one-to-one sessions with photography professionals based in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The goal is to let a photographer step back from the daily risks of covering a war and focus on shaping an existing body of work into something that can reach a public audience: editing, sequencing, printing, and preparing it for publication.
Sarajevo was deliberately chosen as the residency’s location. A city that has lived through war, endurance, and recovery, it offers both distance and resonance for a photographer working through material shaped by ongoing conflict. The VII Foundation’s Sarajevo campus is built for exactly this kind of work, combining space for reflection, production, and professional exchange.
The inaugural residency is being developed in partnership with the Ukrainian Association of Professional Photographers (UAPP). The Association will help identify a photographer for whom the residency offers real and timely value. By the end of the residency, the recipient will have a refined, edited body of work, exhibition-quality prints, a publication produced in a limited print run, and a stronger framework for presenting and circulating the project to wider audiences.
The residency is, at its core, an investment in something less visible: the infrastructure that serious documentary work depends on. Time. Editorial attention. Technical support. Space to think. The Paul Lowe Challenge exists to fund exactly this kind of work, training, and support for visual journalists documenting the world’s hardest stories.
If you want to help support initiatives like this, the next Paul Lowe Challenge takes place in September 2026. You can ride, run, swim, or set your own challenge, wherever you are.