Any effort to describe the photography of Lu Guang by reference to the work of other artists would almost certainly invoke the name of W. Eugene Smith. (It is, for instance, just about impossible to look at Slide 4 without thinking of “Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath.”)

So it seems especially fitting that Mr. Lu, a Chinese freelancer, is the recipient of this year’s $30,000 W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography for his project, “Pollution in China.” The announcement was made Wednesday evening in New York by the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund on the occasion of its 30th anniversary.

It is not just Mr. Smith’s work that comes to mind when looking at Mr. Lu’s depiction of the dark social and environmental consequences of China’s modern industrial revolution. There is a bit of Charles Sheeler and Edward Burtynsky. And Hieronymus Bosch.

“Because China’s economy is moving so fast, the pollution is incredibly severe,” he told us Wednesday through a translation by Orville Schell at the Asia Society. “As I became aware of the pollution as China opened up the western area, I felt that people needed to know about this.”

Mr. Lu was born in 1961 in Zhejiang Province and was taking pictures before his 20th birthday, when he worked in a factory. He studied at the fine arts academy at Tsinghua University in Beijing from 1993 to 1995 and has concentrated on social and economic issues in his work since then. In 2003, his pictures of peasants in Henan Province who had been infected with HIV after selling their blood won the first prize for a story about contemporary issues from World Press Photo.

In the words of the Smith fund, its annual grants are intended to reward photographers “who have demonstrated a deep commitment to documenting the human condition in the formidable tradition of compassionate dedication that W. Eugene Smith exhibited.”

The jurors were Helen Marcus, president emerita of the fund; Devika Daulet-Singh, founder and director of the Photo-Ink gallery in New Delhi; and Jeff L. Rosenheim, curator of the department of photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They also awarded a $5,000 fellowship to Krisanne Johnson of Brooklyn and announced three other finalists from among 216 proposals: Matt Eich, of Norfolk, Va.; Johan Spanner, from Copenhagen; and Joseph Sywenkyj of Campton, N.H.

“The impact on me is very significant,” Mr. Lu said. “It confirms this work. The money will also allow me to do even better. Certainly, I’m not finished. There are many other places I have to shoot.”