Louie Palu won the 2010 $15,000 Alexia Foundation professional grant for his proposal to document Kandahar, Afghanistan, the birthplace of the Taliban and "the center of all crossroads through this region of Asia for centuries....It is here that I believe the world must focus to understand the people, their hopes and needs to find a path to end this conflict."

A K M Shehab Uddin won a Special Recognition Grant of $7500 from the Foundation. This is only the second time in the history of the Foundation that a second award has been made. Uddin will document "pavement dwellers," in Dhaka, Bangladesh. There are 15-20,000 migrants lured to the capital by the promise of better opportunities, have become porters, laborers, rickshaw pullers, servants, sex traders and solid waste recyclers. Here, they have become residents of the streets. In Bangladesh, pavement dwellers are looked down upon as social outcasts.

Palu is a documentary photographer based in Washington, D.C. He is represented by ZUMA Press. He graduated from the Ontario College of Art in 1991. Palu's persistence has paid off. He has applied for the Alexia grant several times and was a finalist last year. His work has appeared in numerous publications, festivals and exhibitions internationally, which includes the photojournalism festival Visa Pour L'Image in Perpignan, France, and the 2009 New York Photo Festival.

He has been awarded numerous accolades including a, Silver Medal from the Society of Newspaper Design, eight awards from the White House News Photographers Association, Hearst 8x10 Photography Biennial Award, 2008 Canadian Photojournalist of the Year, Hasselblad Master Award and a 2009 Aftermath Grant.

Palu's work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, TIME, Newsweek, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Economist, The Globe and Mail and Sunday Times Magazine. He has worked on assignments internationally, focusing on the war in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay over the course of the last four years.

Uddin is Drik Picture Library Ltd. team leader and photographer in Dhaka. He was a staff photographer at the Daily Sangbad, a leading national daily newspaper published in Dhaka for seven years. He attended Pathshala, the South Asian Institute of Photography from 2007-2009. He was Assistant Lecturer for the College of Journalism and Mass Communication in Katmandu, Nepal, in 2006-07.

There were 210 applications that after, four rounds, the judges narrowed to seven finalists. The other five finalists, in no particular order are:

Saiful Huq Omi, also an Alexia finalist last year, was born in Bangladesh in 1980, graduated from Pathshala South Asian Institute of Photography and became a photographer in 2005. He is represented by Polaris Images. His works have been published in Newsweek, Foto File USA, New Internationalist, Time Magazine, The Guardian, and Asian Photography and in the Arab News. He has lectured and presented his works at The London School of Economics, Rochester Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and Columbia University and in many other universities.

Will Baxter graduated from University of Kansas School of Journalism in 2000. He is based in Thailand and has photographed for Newsweek, Der Spiegel, Stern, World Picture Network, Bloomberg News, Thompson Reuters, and has been a writer and photographer for ThaiDay in Thailand and the BBC.com.

Marco Vernaschi was born in Turin, Italy, in 1973, and is based in Buenos Aires. Marco received grants from the Pulitzer Center in 2008-09 and 2009-10, he won the top prize for the Lens Culture International Exposure Award 2009 and was selected among the 10 winners of the Photo España Ojo De Pez Award for Human Values 2009. He was awarded the FUJIFILM Prize for Photojournalism in 2006 and was named Young Photojournalist of the Year in 2004 by the Italian Photography Foundation.

Carlos Javier Ortiz is a freelance photographer based in Chicago. He works for Ebony, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Times of London, the Guardian, Stern and publications. He was a photographer for the Courier-Post Newspaper in New Jersey from 2002-2004. He won the Robert F Kennedy award in 2009.

Noah Addis received a degree in photography from Drexel University in 1997. He was a staff photographer for the Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger from 1997-2008 and is now a freelance photographer represented by Corbis Images. He has won several awards including New Jersey Press Photographer of the Year.

Louie Palu’s portfolio
A K M Shehab Udin's portfolio