The $20,000 award is given to encourage collaboration in documentary work in the tradition of  American photographer Dorothea Lange and writer and social scientist Paul Taylor.

Markova-Gold and Dohrmann’s project, If You Smoke Cigarettes in Public, You Are a Prostitute: Women and Prostitution in Morocco, looks at female prostitution in Morocco in relation to "the experiences of two American non-Muslim women documenting women’s lives in a country where pre-marital virginity is considered sacred."

In a statement, the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University says: "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."

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.

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. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Sasha Wolf Gallery; Host gallery in London; and the Lumix Festival for Young Photojournalism in Hanover, Germany.

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.

For more information, visit http://cds.aas.duke.edu.