Alex Boerner February 26, 2010

Wedding reception. Orlando, Florida 2004

Alex Boerner (b. 1976, USA) is currently a staff photographer with the Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers located on the southeast coast of Florida. He previously worked at The N’West Iowa REVIEW after graduating with a degree in Entrepreneurship from the University of St. Thomas, in St. Paul, MN. He shoots daily and long-term assignments for the newspaper, personal projects and freelance assignments. His work has also been published in The FADER, The New York Times, The St. Petersburg Times, and the London Times.  Alex recently returned from an assignment covering the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti.

About the Photograph:

“Gabriel Hubbard is the first child of Rob and Diane Hubbard, a young couple I photographed in 2002 as part of a long-term story. Diane was four months pregnant with their second child when she developed invasive Ductal Carcinoma, a form of breast cancer. She followed through with the pregnancy despite recommendations from several doctors to terminate, and gave birth to a healthy baby girl named Charisma. Sadly, Diane was a victim of her treatment. After going into remission for breast cancer she succumbed to bone cancer resulting from radiation therapy at the age of 29. After a period of a little over two years following Diane’s passing, Rob got re-married to his high-school sweetheart. This is a photo of Gabriel at the reception for his father’s second marriage.”

Editors Note: The photo above is from Alex’s story “Gift of God’s Grace” featured on his website.

Jan Stürmann February 19, 2010

Youth Correctional Facility. Chino, California

Jan Stürmann (b. 1967, South Africa) is a photographer and multimedia producer based in Berkeley, California. He studied photography at Pretoria Technicon. His publishing credits include The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Time, Newsweek and Marie Claire. Other institutional clients include: AARP, American Friends Service Committee and Numi Tea. Most of his current work is with NGO’s, corporate and editorial clients wanting to harness the story-telling potential of multimedia.

Editor’s note: Check out Jan’s powerful piece “Solitary Confinement” in the multimedia/foundation section of his site.

About the Photograph:

“This photograph was taken at the Herman Stark Youth Correctional Facility in Chino, California east of Los Angeles during a weekly Native American Sweat Lodge ceremony. This is the one place in the prison where wards, often from rival gangs, can drop their guard and experience a brief period of vulnerability and emotional honesty. The ceremony is open to everyone, irrespective of race. No blood has ever been spilled on the lodge grounds. The wards insisted I join their ceremony, which takes place in a dark lodge. Participants sit in a circle around a pile of glowing rocks. As the lodge leader threw water onto the rocks, filling the lodge with steam, prayers for strength and guidance filled the darkness.”

Alex Welsh February 15, 2010

Hunters Point, San Francisco 2008

Alex Welsh (b. 1986, USA) is a recent graduate from San Francisco State University, where he majored in Photojournalism and minored in both History and Middle Eastern Studies.  His interest in documentary photography is in its ability to examine longstanding and systemic problems in society and establish a dialogue with audiences to confront those issues.  Over the last year, Welsh worked in San Francisco’s Hunters Point neighborhood photographing the issues such as poverty, criminalization, gang violence, and displacement surrounding the gentrification of the city’s last predominantly African American community. His clients include the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Oakland Tribune, The FADER, and FLYP Media.  Welsh is currently based in Brooklyn.

About the Photograph:

“This picture was taken in the Alice Griffith ‘Double Rock’ housing projects in Hunters Point.  I was driving into the projects with a rapper from the neighborhood when I saw the playground burning, so I started shooting this boy on his bike watching it burn.  A bunch of the kids from the neighborhood around me were upset, and as the fire department came and put it out, a group of girls approached me to ask if there was going to be a new playground put in.  It was a bit heartbreaking, and so I told them that I was sure they would replace it.  They got really excited and started asking me what kind of things where going to be in the new playground, but I told them I had no idea.”

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Carlos Javier Ortiz February 10, 2010

Day Without an Immigrant March. Chicago 2006

Carlos Javier Ortiz (b.1977, Puerto Rico) attended Columbia College where he studied photojournalism. Carlos was a staff photographer for “Chicago In The Year 2000”, a year long project documenting the city and its inhabitants. He worked for several years as a photojournalist for newspapers in Philadelphia and New Jersey and is currently working on a cross-cultural youth violence project, which documents adolescents in Chicago and Guatemala. Carlos was a finalist for the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography in 2008 and recently received the 2009 domestic photography award from the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights for the Too Young To Die project. His work has appeared in Newsweek, Washington Post, Time Magazine, NPR, The Guardian, Stern Magazine and other publications.

About the Photograph:

“The photo is of a man at an immigration rights rally in Chicago. I was drawn to him because he was dressed as the Statue of Liberty and therefore was dressed as a woman. I was also interested in him because he represented an American icon in a sea of people who were fighting for their rights as Americans. There was something about the image of a man dressed as the Statue of Liberty juxtaposed with people engaged in such an important fight that really captured me. An estimated 400,000 protesters took to the streets of Chicago almost four years ago to show their support for the eleven million illegal immigrants living in the United States.”

Greta Pratt February 8, 2010

Abraham Lincoln’s Traveling Log Cabin. Kentucky

Greta Pratt (b.1975, United States) is the author of two monographs, Using History, and In Search of the Corn Queen. Pratt’s works are represented in major public and private collections, including The Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Photography and The Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Pratt was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, served as photography bureau chief of Reuters International in New York City, and her photographs have been featured in The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker. She is a recipient of a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Artist Fellowship. Pratt is currently an Assistant Professor of Photography at Old Dominion University.

About the Photograph:

“This is a photo of Lincoln presenter Gerald Bestrom. Mr. Bestrom drives this camper around the Midwest performing for school groups and senior citizen gatherings as the 16th president. He likes to entertain so he plays a comb and a saw, dances a jig and recites from Lincoln’s speeches.  The men that I photographed for this series belong to The Association of Lincoln Presenters. They are passionate about Lincoln and spend time studying, reading and performing for school groups, community celebrations, and senior citizen centers. Each one started this unusual occupation for a different reason, but all became completely immersed in the ideals of Abraham Lincoln.”