As media outlets’ revenue and budgets shrink, globe-trotting photojournalists are collaborating more often with aid agencies and other charities to report on social issues or conditions in disaster and conflict zones, says The New York Times. The Photo Philanthropy foundation gives annual cash awards to professional and amateur photographers who work with nongovernmental organizations to further humanitarian goals.

Such partnerships can raise conflict-of-interest questions for photographers who say they turn down offers of work from multinational corporations whose policies they oppose, according to the Times’s Lens blog on visual journalism.

“There’s only two kinds of people that go to conflict zones and places in crisis and that’s the NGOs and the journalists,” said photographer Stanley Greene, who was hired last year by Doctors Without Borders to shoot in a hospital it operates in Bangladesh. “We’re in bed with each other. You can’t operate without them. Any conflict, any crisis, you’re going to have to deal with an NGO. That’s just fact.”