Ed Kashi is a photojournalist dedicated to documenting the social and political issues that define our times. A sensitive eye and an intimate relationship to his subjects have become the signatures of his award-winning work, and his complex imagery has been recognized for its compelling rendering of the human condition.
|
Born in New York City in 1957, Kashi graduated from Syracuse University in 1979 with a degree in photojournalism and has since photographed in more than 60 countries. His images have appeared in National Geographic, the New York Times Magazine, Time, MediaStorm, GEO, Newsweek, and many other domestic and international publications.
Kashi's first project for National Geographic was a cover story on the Kurds. It was subsequently published as his second monograph, When the Borders Bleed: The Struggle of the Kurds. Since then he has covered many subjects for National Geographic, including Syria, the Zulus of South Africa, the Danube, and oil in the Niger Delta.
Most recently, Kashi's innovative approach to photography and filmmaking produced the Iraqi/Kurdistan Flipbook, which premiered on MSNBC.com in December 2006. Using stills in a moving image format, this creative and thought-provoking form of visual storytelling garnered an award from the 26th annual Black Maria Film and Video Festival (2007) and was utilized in a series of exhibitions on the Iraq War presented at The George Eastman House.
Kashi's personal projects include documentary work on the Protestant community in Northern Ireland, self-published in a book titled The Protestants: No Surrender. In the mid-'90s, Kashi spent several years documenting the lives of Jewish settlers in the West Bank. The settlers' story has been published worldwide, and a photograph from this essay received an award in the World Press Photo 1995 competition.
In 2003, Kashi completed an eight-year project called Aging in America: The Years Ahead, which included a traveling exhibition, an award-winning documentary film, a Web site, and a book. This work examines the social impact of the expanding elderly population in the United States. Features from this project won awards from the Pictures of the Year and World Press Photo and were chosen for the American Photography and Communication Arts annuals. The book was named one of the best photo books of 2003 by American Photo magazine.
Between editorial assignments and personal projects, Kashi teaches and mentors students of photography, participates in forums, and lectures on photojournalism, documentary photography, and multi-media storytelling. In 1998, he taught a semester in London for Syracuse University.
In December 2002, Kashi and his wife, writer and filmmaker Julie Winokur, founded Talking Eyes Media, a nonprofit multimedia company that explores significant social issues. The first documentary project for Talking Eyes Media produced a book and traveling exhibition on uninsured Americans called Denied: The Crisis of America's Uninsured.
