JUDGES - Q1 '08 WPJA CONTEST

KRISTEN ASHBURN, PHOTOJOURNALIST

Documentary photographer Kristen Ashburn is based in New York City. She has received numerous honors including an Emmy Award nomination (2007), the John Faber Award from the Overseas Press Club of America (2007), a Getty Grant (2006), National Press Photographers Association's (NPPA) Best of Photojournalism (2007, 2006, 2003), Pictures of the Year (POY-2007), and two World Press Photo prizes (2005, 2003). In 2004, she won Canon's Female Photojournalist Award (AFJ) and was named as one of Thirty Emerging Photographers by Photo District News (PDN). In 2003, she was granted the Marty Forscher Fellowship for Humanistic Photography. Ms. Ashburn's photographs and stories from the Middle East, Europe, and Africa have appeared in many publications including The New Yorker, Time, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone and Life among others.

JON LOWENSTEIN, PHOTOJOURNALIST

Jon Lowenstein has been a professional photographer for more than ten years. He specializes in long-term, in-depth documentary photographic projects which question the status quo. He believes that documentary photographers make a significant contribution to our society by serving as visual witnesses and historians. Most importantly, he loves people and photography. To those who say that photography is irrelevant, he asks them to imagine a world without photography.

He was one of eight staff photographers for the CITY 2000 (Chicago In The Year 2000) project, during which time he started an ongoing project about Mexican Immigration to the United States. Recently, Lowenstein completed work on his first book, which explores the lives of developmentally disabled people in Illinois, and is now working on several book projects. For more than three years he taught photography to middle-school students at Paul Revere Elementary School and helped publish “Our Streets”, a community newspaper about the nearby South Side Chicago community which he is documenting.

He has won many awards, including being recently named a 2008 Alicia Patterson Fellow and garnering the 2007 Getty Award for Editorial Images. He also received a 2007 World Press Photo Award, a 2007 USC Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism Racial Justice Fellow, the 2005 NPPA New America Award, a 2004 World Press photo prize, a Nikon Sabbatical Grant, the 58th National Press Photographer’s Pictures of the Year Magazine Photographer of the Year Award and Fuji Community Awareness Award. He participated in the Open Society Institute’s Moving Walls VII Exhibition in New York City and was a finalist for the 2006 W. Eugene Smith Award.

Lowenstein’s work has appeared in Mother Jones, TIME, Smithsonian, US News and World Report, Fortune, Elle, The New York Times, Stern and Chicago Magazine, among others. Lowenstein attended the University of Iowa and has taught at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Western Kentucky’s Mountain Workshop and the Southern Short Course.

JIM GEHRZ, PHOTOJOURNALIST

Gehrz worked at the Worthington Daily Globe in southwestern Minnesota before becoming a staff photojournalist at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He has been named state Photographer of the Year eleven times. Jim received the 2004 Scripps Howard Foundation National Journalism Award for Photojournalism. In 2005, the NPPA named him Newspaper Photographer Of The Year. Also in 2005, Gehrz was one of three finalists nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in feature photography. In 2006, he received a regional Emmy Award for still photography produced and presented on the Web. Recently, the NPPA recognized one of his stories as the Best of Photojournalism 2007 “Best Audio Slide Show.”

PETER POWER, PHOTOJOURNALIST

Peter Power is a 20-year veteran photojournalist from Canada. For 17 years he was a staff member at Canada's largest daily newspaper, The Toronto Star, but moved in 2007 to join the expanding staff of Canada's National Newspaper, The Globe and Mail. Power continues to document life in the Toronto area, as well as national and international breaking news, and in-depth feature stories. His assignments have ranged from the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico (1994), to the destruction of Hurricane Andrew, Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan, the slums ("favelas") of Rio de Janeiro, the ongoing conflict in Mogadishu, Somalia and three Olympic Games.

His work has earned numerous Industry awards and accolades including three of Canada's National Newspaper Awards (NNA)--he's been nominated six times. He has also been named the National Press Photographer's Association's (NPPA) Region Two Photographer of the Year three times, and has twice earned the same honor from the Eastern Canadian News Photographers Association. To his credit, he has numerous Picture of the Year honors from various professional organizations including the Society for Newspaper Design. Peter has recently expanded his portfolio by adding video production, primarily of long-term documentary stories. For work completed in 2007, he won Multimedia Project of the Year honors from the News Photographers Association of Canada, and several other stories have won or placed in the NPPA BOP, and the POYi multimedia categories. One of his stories in 2007 was also nominated for a Webby Award.

Power also sits as a member of the Advisory Committee for Loyalist College's Photojournalism Program--the school he graduated from in 1989. Prior to 1989, Power spent five years in the Canadian military under the Regular Officer Training Plan. This was a period of his life which he largely credits for his personal discipline, attention to detail, and problem solving skills--all of which he says he uses on a daily basis as a photojournalist.