Christopher Anderson Son

Initially working in color, Anderson began photographing a wide range
 of subjects for magazines. In 1996, he became a contract photographer
for “U.S. News and World Report” where he began documenting social issues such as the effects of Russia’s economic crisis, Afghan refugees in Pakistan and, more recently, the election of Evo Morales in Bolivia. In 1999, Anderson boarded a small boat with 44 Haitian immigrants trying to sail to the United States. The experience would significantly change his work to focus on what he often thought of as experiential journalism. Working now in B&W, Anderson was honored with the Robert Capa Gold Medal Award. Later that year, he photographed the stone throwers of Gaza, and was named Kodak’s “Young Photographer of the Year”. He would go on to spend the next several years photographing extensively in conflict zones such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon including following the first company of American soldiers to enter Baghdad in 2003. Later that year he published his first monograph, Nonfiction.

In 2004, Anderson began following the “revolution” of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. This work would become his second book, Capitolio (published in 2009) and is the culmination of four years of photographs. 
He joined the VII Agency in 2002, and became a Magnum nominee in 2005 and member in 2010. He has served as a contract photographer for Newsweek magazine since 2005. He lives in New York with his son and wife.

LaToya Ruby Frazier Notion of Family

LaToya Ruby Frazier was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She earned a BFA in applied media arts at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania in 2004, and an MFA in art photography from Syracuse University in 2007. She has been an artist in residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in 2010, Art Omi in 2009, Center for Photography at Woodstock in 2008 and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2007. She is currently an artist and resident at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program.

Frazier’s work has been written about in The New York Times, The New Yorker, ArtForum, Artnet, Art Papers, Art Info, Art in America,The Brooklyn Rail, The Huffington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Village Voice. Her work has been shown in museums and galleries in New York City including P.S.1 MOMA Greater New York, the New Museum of Contemporary Art Younger Than Jesus, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Higher Pictures Gallery and internationally in Copenhagen Denmark. Frazier’s first solo museum exhibition, Mother May I, was at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit May 2010.

Frazier has worked as a photo editor for Newsweek. She is a member of Society for Photographic Education and Enfoco. She has been commissioned by the Aperture Foundation to photograph the New York City Green Cart Initiative for 2010 -2011. Currently she is the Associate Curator for the Mason Gross Galleries in the Department for Visual Arts where she also teaches photography in the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, New Brunswick NJ.

Ashley Gilbertson Bedrooms of the Fallen

Ashley Gilbertson was born in Australia. He began his career at thirteen taking photographs of skateboarders and graffiti artists, embarking on a path that ultimately led to a special interest in conflict and displaced peoples.

With no formal education, Ashley studied photojournalism in Melbourne under Emmanuel Santos, and later from Masao Endo, Emmanuel’s mentor, in the Japanese highlands. Ashley’s tasks there — or lessons, he is still unsure — consisted of mixing cement and dragging logs uphill to where he helped assemble them into cabin amidst the mountains.

Ashley Gilbertson’s photographs from Iraq, where he worked almost exclusively from 2002 until 2008 on assignment for The New York Times, gained him recognition from the Overseas Press Club who, in 2004, honored him with prestigious Robert Capa Gold Medal for his work in Falluja. 
 
His first book, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, was released in 2007. Since then, Gilbertson has been working on Bedrooms of Fallen, a collection of photographs depicting the intact bedrooms of soldiers who died in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2009, a substantial part of the project was commissioned by The New York Times Magazine and published in March of 2010. 
 
Gilbertson meanwhile continued to concentrate on the two wars by examining veterans’ issues including Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and suicide for Time Magazine and The Virginia Quarterly Review. He lives in New York City with his wife and child.

David Liittschwager ONE CUBIC FOOT

David Liittschwager is a freelance photographer who grew up in Eugene, Oregon. Between 1983 and 1986, he worked as an assistant to Richard Avedon in New York City. After working in advertising, he turned his skills to portraiture with an emphasis on natural history subjects.

Now a contributing photographer to National Geographic and other magazines, Liittschwager is also a successful book author. In 2002 he produced the books Skulls and X-Ray Ichthyology: The Structure of Fishes for the California Academy of Sciences. Liittschwagerʼs books in collaboration with Susan Middleton, include Archipelago, Remains of a Rainbow, Witness and Here Today.

Recipient of an Endangered Species Coalition Champion Award for Education and Outreach and a Bay & Paul Foundation Biodiversity Leadership Award, Liittschwager lectures and shows his work around the world in both fine art and natural history contexts. His photographs have been exhibited at many museums, including the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. and the Honolulu Academy of Art in Hawaiʼi and currently at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. Recently, Liittschwager was honored by a 2008 World Press Photo Award for his article on Marine Microfauna in National Geographic magazine (November 2007). He lives in San Francisco.

Steve McCurry The Last Roll of Kodachrome

McCurry’s work has been featured in every major magazine in the world and frequently appears in National Geographic magazine with recent articles on Tibet, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and the temples of Angkor Wat, Cambodia. McCurry is driven by an innate curiosity and sense of wonder about the world and everyone in it. He has an uncanny ability to cross boundaries of language and culture to capture stories of human experience. “Most of my images are grounded in people. I look for the unguarded moment, the essential soul peeking out, experience etched on a person’s face. I try to convey what it is like to be that person, a person caught in a broader landscape, that you could call the human condition.”

A high point in his career was the rediscovery of the previously unidentified Afghan refugee girl that many have described as the most recognizable photograph in the world today. When McCurry finally located Sharbat Gula after almost two decades, he said, “Her skin is weathered; there are wrinkles now, but she is a striking as she was all those years ago.” McCurry returned from an extended assignment in China on September 10, 2001. His coverage at Ground Zero on September 11 is a testament to the heroism and nobility of the people of New York City. “You felt the horror and immediately, instinctively understood that our lives would never be the same again.”

McCurry has published books including The Imperial Way (1985), Monsoon (1988), Portraits (1999), South Southeast (2000), Sanctuary (2002), The Path to Buddha: A Tibetan Pilgrimage (2003), Steve McCurry (2005), Looking East (2006) In the Shadow of Mountains (2007) and The Unguarded Moment. (2009)

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Martin Bell and Mary Ellen Mark PROM

Prom is an American tradition—a rite of passage and one of the most important rituals of American youth; a day that is never forgotten—a day full of hopes and dreams for the future. For four years, from 2006-2009, filmmaker Martin Bell and photographer Mary Ellen Mark travelled around the country and documented proms. They went to twelve high schools in 10 cities, covering a wide range of ethnic and economic groups.

While Mary Ellen Mark made portraits of the Prom- goers with the 20×24 Polaroid camera, Martin Bell interviewed the students in an adjacent studio. When the project finally came to a close, Bell had interviewed over three hundred students.

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Past images from the Master Talks series