$500,000. In four years, that's the amount of money Getty Images has donated to photographers to finish various reportages. This week, Getty has donated another $70,000 to three professional photographers and two student shooters.

Image © Brenda Ann Kenneally.

US-based photographers Krisanne Johnson, Brenda Ann Kenneally and Afghan Zalmai all received $20,000, as well as collaborative editorial support from Getty Images, to pursue their documentary photography projects.

Johnson's work is dubbed I Love You Real Fast and examines the lives of young women in Swaziland, where women have a life expectancy of close to 31, due to the country’s high rate of HIV infections. 'My intent is not only to shed light on their struggle, but to present the full spectrum of their experiences and to capture deeper, truer visual references that are distinct from a sea of status quo images that define Africa to most of the world,' says Johnson.

Kenneally will use her $20,000 to continue her five-year project on Upstate Girls, a study of the issues of class and poverty in Troy, New York. Zalmai, who also won €8000 with the Visa d'Or Feature Award, will try, with this grant, to bring a new vision of Afghanistan to the Western world. 'As most of the western media focuses on what is taking place militarily, I feel strongly that the extensive human tragedy taking place in my country is being ignored by Western eyes and is going unnoticed to the rest of the world,' he says in a statement.

Student photographers Ed Ou of Canada and US-based Carl Kiilsgaard will both receive $5000. Ou, an energetic young photographer has been working on Perilous Journey, which documents the full journey that Somali refugees take as each year thousands flee from the violence in Mogadishu to the port city of Bosasso and the perilous boat journey to Yemen begins, as they seek work as laborers in the oil rich Persian Gulf.

Kiilsgaard's project, The White Family, follows a family that has lived in rural Kentucky – where, in 1964, President Lyndon Johnson declared a war on poverty that has not yet been won – for generations.

The grants were awarded by a jury that included Cheryl Newman, picture editor of Telegraph Magazine in the UK, Jean-Francois Leroy, director general of Visa Pour l’Image and Volker Lensch, department head at Stern Magazine.

With the decline of commissioned assignments, the grants are seen as one of the only ways to spend longer period of time on personal projects, the photographers admitted at the award ceremony in Perpignan, France. 'For special long-term stories you want to do, you often have to do it yourself,' says Ou. 'At the end of the day you have to put down your own money because most newspapers and magazines will just say that they don't [invest] that.'

Eugene Richards, who received $20,000 earlier this year, adds that the grant is more than just money. 'It's the pick up you need when you need it the most.'

For more information visit gettyimages.com/grants.