Photo by Clay Enos

Award-winning photojournalist Ron Haviv has produced some of the most important images of conflict and other humanitarian crises that have made headlines from around the world since the end of the Cold War.

A co-founder of VII, whose work is published by top magazines worldwide, including: Fortune, The NY Times Magazine, Time, Vanity Fair, Paris Match and Stern. He has published two critically acclaimed collections of his photography — Blood and Honey: A Balkan War Journal, and Afghanistan: On the Road to Kabul – and has contributed his wide-ranging body of work to several other books.

With a special focus on exposing human rights violations, he has covered conflict and humanitarian crises in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Russia and the Balkans. Most recently, he has documented wars in Darfur and the DR Congo.

His often-searing photographs have earned Haviv some of the highest accolades in photography, including awards from World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year, Overseas Press Club, and the Leica Medal of Excellence. He regularly lectures at universities and seminars, and numerous museums and galleries have featured his work, including the United Nations, The Louvre and The Council on Foreign Relations.

Haviv has been the central character in three films. National Geographic Explorer’s Freelance in a World of Risk explores the hazards inherent in combat photography. The Serbian-made documentary Vivisect explores Serbian reaction to the Blood and Honey exhibit. Eyes of the World, which has featured in film festival worldwide, examines Haviv as a witness to war. In addition, Haviv has spoken about his work on The Charlie Rose Show, NPR, Good Morning America, ABC World News Tonight, CNN, MSNBC and The Best Damn Sports Show Ever.

Ron Haviv @ VII

Ron Haviv’s Blood and Honey

Michael Robinson Chavez recently joined The Los Angeles Times as a staff photographer after working at The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. In addition to photographing local stories and events, he has covered wide-ranging international assignments in over 45 countries including: the Congolese Civil War, the war in Bosnia, Bantu refugees in Kenya, violence in San Salvador, the Zapatista uprising in Mexico, the conflict in Israel/Palestine and the US led invasion and occupation of Iraq.

From 1994-95 he photographed events in Central America and Mexico for the Associated Press. Michael was twice named Photographer of the Year in 2004 and 2007 by the White House News Photographers’ Association. In addition he was named 3rd place Photographer of the Year in the Best of Photojournalism competition 2004. He has received past awards from the National Press Photographers Association, the Atlanta Photojournalism Seminar, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the Society of Newspaper Design and the Pictures of the Year competition. He was recently named a finalist for a Getty Grant.  He won an Award of Excellence: Newspaper Photographer of the Year 2008 in this year’s POYi competition.

His work has been exhibited from his native California to Havana, Cuba to the prestigious Visa Pour l’Image photojournalism festival in France, which showed his 10-year project on Peru. His photos have also been exhibited at the Newseum in New York City and Washington DC, Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, Ojo Ajeno in Lima, Peru as well as Washington DC’s Corcoran Gallery. An exhibit of his photographs of Roma in eastern Slovakia is currently being shown at galleries throughout that country. In August 2007 he will have an exhibit at the War Photo Limited Gallery in Dubrovnik, Croatia of his photographs from the Hezbollah/Israeli war of 2006.

He currently lives with his wife and assortment of horses, dogs and cats outside of Los Angeles.

He will be teaching Storytelling with Heart and Power. “I would like to talk to the students about keeping their personal vision alive between sometimes less than adventurous assignment work. Also pushing it and experimenting with their visions, breaking out of their comfort level and trying new approaches and techniques. Think we can all use with a bit of that!”

http://www.robinsonchavez.com/

Through documentary photography, Andrea Bruce brings attention to people living in the aftermath of war.

For the past eight years she has chronicled the world’s most troubled areas as a staff photographer for The Washington Post. Five of those years have taken her to the Middle East, where she is now based. She writes a weekly column for The Post called “Unseen Iraq.”

Her awards include top honors from the White House News Photographers Association (where she has been named Photographer of the Year four times), the International Pictures of the Year contest, and the prestigious John Faber award from the Overseas Press Club in New York.

She has also been a finalist for The Aftermath Project grant as well as the Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship.

She was the recipient of the first-ever Inge Morath grant by Magnum Photos, The Canon Female Photojournalist award for her work in Kashmir, and a grant from the Alexia Foundation for World Peace.
Vitale’s photographs have been published in major international magazines such as National Geographic, Adventure, Geo, Newsweek, Time, Smithsonian and Le Figaro, among others. They have also been presented in international exhibitions including: Visa Pour L’Image, Perpignan, France; Reporters Sans Frontiers, Paris; the FotoArt Festival in Poland; the Open Society Institute and The United Nations in New York.

Now based in Washington, DC, Vitale is a contract photographer with National Geographic and is producing a book and exhibit for the Nature Conservancy about threatened environments around the world.

AmiVitale.com

Kael covered the US invasion of Iraq and worked there until 2004. Her photography from Iraq focuses on the birth of the Iraqi resistance groups, and the impact of the US invasion on security and the lives of Iraqi civilians. That work was included in the book and exhibition “Unembedded: Four Independent Journalists on the War in Iraq” (Chelsea Green, 2005).

She is currently working on a multimedia project documenting coastal erosion in southeast Louisiana and the impact of environmental degradation on the communities there. The photography is commissioned by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. She has taught writing and photojournalism at the American University in Bulgaria and documentary photography at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta. She is currently a Nieman Journalism Fellow at Harvard University and is represented by Panos Pictures in London. Kael has a degree in English Literature from Boston University and a MA in journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia.

She was born in Middletown, NY, 1971.

www.panos.co.uk

www.azpix.com.br

Henrik has worked extensively in Latin America, the Balkans and the Middle East documenting the impact of war and poverty on the under priviliged.
With a keen interest in online story telling and an emphasis on sound in multimedia he’s just completed one years work on a multimedia piece on Danish combat soldiers in Afghanistan.

Henrik’s been awarded several times including NPPA’s ’Best of Photojournalism – independent media’ in 2006 for the multimedia piece ”The Ardoyne Suicides” shot and co-produced with longtime friend and colleague in Bombay Flying Club, Poul Madsen.

”Storytelling on the web is still only in an infant state – this is the moment of defining the rules of the narrative, and I want to be part of that”.

Henrik has worked as an intern at Morgenavisen Jylands-Posten and as a staff photographer at 24 Timer. Today he works as a freelance photojournalist and independent multimedia producer.

www.fotoco.dk
www.bombayfc.com

His stock images have been featured by Prentice Hall, Peter Owen Publishers, Overseas Adventure Travel, Wilderness Travel, Rotary International, Things Asian, PSA, Asia Society of New York, Kumuka Worldwide Expeditions, Grand Circle Tours, and Guatours, Emory University & the University of Arizona. He also co-juried Diversity of Devotion, a photo-documentary project and competition, which explored the varied and unique religious and spiritual beliefs of NYC.

His interest in photographing cultural ceremonies and tribal ritualshas resulted in documentary coverage of the Maha Kumbh Mela & Pushkar Camel Fair of India; the 2,000-year-old performance-ritual of Theyyam in Kerala; Timket & Hamer Bullah (Jumping of the Bulls) ceremony of Ethiopia; Holy Week & Easter Processions of Guatemala; the Entrada Universitaria Folkloric Festival of Bolivia, the ritualistic dances of the Advisasis of Chhattisgarh, the Tantric-based dances of Bhutan and the violent exorcisms practiced in various Sufi shrines of India.

He presented “Path of the Novices: A photo journey in the Buddhist monasteries of India, Laos, Burma and Bhutan” at the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art in NewYork City. This audio-visual presentation of over 125 photographs focused on the daily lives of novices in the Buddhist monasteries of Dharmasala, Sikkim, Burma (Myanmar), the Kingdom of Bhutan and Laos.

His photographic interest is expanding into producing multimedia stories, merging still photography and ambient sound (generally recorded live while I am photographing), and musical soundtracks. The most recent are White Shadows and Supplicants of Bahadur Shaheed, which were produced in Vrindavan and Varanasi (India). These multimedia stories are found on his main website.

He also leads by invitation-only photography tours to India and to the Himalayan Kingdoms of Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim, and Indochina.

www.telsawy.com

Blog: www.tesimages.com (thetravelphotographer.blogspot.com)

Guy was born in Italy in 1978. He spent his childhood between Italy and the US. In 1997 he moved to Milan, where he studied and worked until late 2003. He received a degree in Communication Science from an Italian university in November 2003 upon the completion of a thesis project focusing on the semiotics of Vietnam War photography. In early 2002 he completed a professional photography course in Milan.

Since 2003 Guy’s work has been focused on conflicts and social issues, mainly in the Middle East and Africa. He moved to Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, in 2006 to concentrate on contemporary African issues while working for his editorial clients. Guy is deeply committed to exploring the continent’s social dynamics at every level, from small sub cultures in its mega capitals to the changing lives of rural communities whose social structures have been so dramatically altered in the last century.

Several of the publications that have featured Guy’s photography include: Vanity Fair IT, US and DE, L’Espresso, Le Figaro Magazine, Paris Match, National Geographic, Le Point, GQ Italy, Der Spiegel, US News & World Report, Newsweek, USA TODAY, Specchio, Max De, The New York Times, Time Magazine, D, Cicero and Stern.

www.guycalaf.com