TED Community » Jon Lowenstein

About Me

Jon Lowenstein has been a professional photographer for more than ten years. He specializes in long-term, in-depth projects that confront the realms of power, poverty, and violence. As a documentary photographer, he strives for unsparing clarity, and believes images make a critical contribution by revealing the subjects of history that lack voice. At the core of the work, and by his own admission, is a lighted love of people. An equally intractable believer in the art, he asks those who consider photography unessential to picture a world with no pictures.

For more than a decade Lowenstein has traveled, studied, and documented the experiences of undocumented Latin Americans living throughout the United States. He has followed the migrant trail from Central America, through Mexico and throughout the United States in an effort to the real stories of the men and women who make up the largest transnational migration in world history. He is member and owner of the NOOR Images cooperative and photo agency.

Lowenstein was recently named a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow. He was chosen out of 3000 applicants for the prestigious prize. In 2008 he was named the Joseph P. Albright Fellow by the Alicia Patterson Foundation and also won a 2007 Getty Images Grants for Editorial Photography. He also won a 2007 World Press Award and was named as a USC Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism Racial Justice Fellowship. He won the 2005 NPPA New America Award, a 2004 World Press photo prize, 2003 Nikon Sabbatical Grant, the 58th National Press Photographer’s Pictures of the Year Magazine Photographer of the Year Award and Fuji Community Awareness Award.

His international assignments include covering elections in Afghanistan to the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti to social violence in Guatemala. Most recently, he began a project about the impact of cerebral Malaria in Children in Uganda.