Photo by Carl Kiilsgaard, a student at Western Kentucky University. From a series of images document the life of a struggling family in rural eastern Kentucky. Tammie and the children spend many nights sleeping on the couch. The children share a room in the trailer where they live but prefer the comfort of being able to sleep next to their mother.

Kiilsgaard won the 2009 Canon Student Award, a $2,000 cash prize awarded as part of the PDN Photo Annual.

Editors’ note: All this week on the PDN Photo of the Day blog, we’re highlighting winners of the PDN Photo Annual. To see more, please view our online winners gallery.

Photo by Michael Mullady, a student at San Francisco State University. In Nezahualcoyotl, Mexico, Miguel Ortiz washes himself after a long day of work digging through trash. This picture is from a project on small communities in Latin America that live and work on landfills.

Mullady won at $1,500 cash prize as the student winner of the Marty Forscher Fellowship Fund, sponsored by Parsons The New School for Design and PDN. The award is judged by Marty Forscher, Michelle Bogre and Peter B. Kaplan.

Editors’ note: All this week on the PDN Photo of the Day blog, we’re highlighting winners of the PDN Photo Annual. To see more, please view our online winners gallery.

Photo by Leilani Wertens. Wertens is a second year graduate student in photography at Columbia College Chicago, and this image is from a series on estate sales called “Forget Me Not.” In a statement about the project, Wertens writes:

“At estate sales, treasure seekers encounter once-beloved personal and utilitarian objects that lose their original meaning when stripped of their context. Through my arrangement of the spaces and possessions found in each home, I counteract the impersonal nature of an estate sale and the way it distances us from death.”

Photo by John Michael Fulton. Fulton, 20, is a student at Savannah College of Art and Design and specializes in fashion and portrait photography.