Brian Steidle grew up living around the world as the son of a naval officer, now retired Admiral. He graduated with a B.S. from Virginia Polytechnic Institute in 1999 and received a commission in the U.S. Marine Corps as an infantry officer. He completed his service with the USMC at the end of 2003 with the rank of captain.
In January 2004, he accepted a contract position with the Joint Military Commission in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan, working on the North-South ceasefire. Within seven months he worked his way up from a team leader to the senior operations officer. In September 2004, Steidle was invited to serve in Darfur as an unarmed military observer and one of only three U.S. representatives to the African Union monitoring the ceasefire.
After six months, Steidle's conscience would no longer allow him to stand by without taking further action. He he became convinced that he could be more effective by bringing the photographs and story of what he witnessed to the world.
Steidle returned to the United States in early February 2005 and has since spoken at over 100 public awareness events across the country and has been interviewed by as many international and national media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC, CBS Evening News, CNN, NPR, ABC Dateline, and many others. He has met with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, and U.S. ambassadors to the UN. He has testified before the U.S. Congress and has spoken before the UN Human Rights Commission and the British House of Commons.
Steidle remains an advisor to numerous NGOs regarding Darfur and is currently co-writing his memoirs, to be published in the spring by PublicAffairs Books.
More of his story and images can be found in his online photoessay, "In Darfur, My Camera Was Not Enough."
Mark Brecke
Mark Brecke is a photographer and filmmaker who has been documenting war, ethnic conflict, and genocide over ten years and three continents in some of the most troubled regions of the world including Cambodia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Sudan, West Bank, and Iraq.
Emerging from the late 1980s experimental film community in San Francisco, he studied cinema with Phil Green (apprentice of Ansel Adams and assistant to Dorothea Lange), and continued his studies at UC Berkeley with the found footage experimental filmmaker Craig Baldwin.
In 2004, Amnesty International selected Brecke's experimental documentary film War as a Second Language to be included in its permanent film archive.
Since returning from Darfur in December 2004, Brecke has been touring with his images of the Sudan crisis and has given over 60 lectures and slide presentations. He has spoken at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, UCLA School of Law, Brown University, the Fletcher School at Tufts University, and the World Affairs Council. He has been featured on Current TV, NPR, and Amy Goodman's Democracy Now.
Brecke's most recent documentary film They Turned Our Deserts Into Fire (release date fall 2006) captures AMTRAK passengers' reactions to photos and stories from Darfur while Brecke was traveling from San Francisco to Washington D.C. in order to give his Darfur presentation to members of Congress in July 2005. In 2006 the U.S. Senate selected ten of Brecke's Darfur photographs to be hung in the Russell Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington D.C.
For more information about Brecke's work, visit his Web site.
Ron Haviv
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 New York Times Magazine, Time, Vanity Fair, Paris Match, and Stern. He has published two critically acclaimed collections of his photography, Blood and Honey: A Balkan Journal and Afghanistan: On the Road to Kabul. He has contributed his wide-ranging body of work to several other books.
With a special focus on exposing human right violations, Ron Haviv 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 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. Numerous museums and galleries have featured his work, including the UN, 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 was featured in film festivals 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, and MSNBC.
For more information about Ron Haviv's work visit VII's Web site.
Paolo Pellegrin
Paolo Pellegrin was born in Rome in 1964. He became a Magnum member in 2005 and has been a Newsweek contract photographer since 2000.
In 1995, his reportage on AIDS in Uganda won him the first prize at World Press Photo in the "Daily Life" category. In 1996, he won the Kodak Young Photographer Award-Visa D'Or in Perpignan for his images on AIDS in Uganda and he was selected to be a part of the World Press Photo Master Class. The same year he was awarded the EuroFuji Award/Italy.
The book Children, containing images of children in Uganda, Romania, and Bosnia, came out in 1997. That same year, he received first prize at the International Photofestival in Gijon for his work on children in Bosnia. His book Cambodia was published in November 1998. This book was the result of Pellegrin's collaboration with MSF (Medicines sans Frontieres) in Italy. In 1999, he was awarded third prize in the category "Portraits" at World Press Photo. In 2000, he won first prize at World Press Photo in the "People in the News" category for his work on Kosovo, received an Honorable Mention in the Hansel-Mieth Award for a story on Albania, and was the recipient of the prestigious Hasselblad Grant. In 2001, he was awarded both the EuroFuji Award/Italy and the Leica Medal of Excellence.
In 2002, Pellegrin won the Hansel-Meith Award for a story on a Bosnian village and won first prize in the World Press Photo in the "People in the News" category for his work in Algeria as well as an Honorable Mention for the Robert Capa Gold Medal Award. In the same year, his book Kosovo: The Flight of Reason was published. Pellegrin also served as a jury member for World Press Photo. In 2003, he was awarded the Borsa di Studio Marco Pesaresi in Italy. He also received the Overseas Press Club Olivier Rebbot award in 2004 and World Press Photo "Stories" second prize for Arafat's funeral.
In 2005 Pellegrin won first prize in the World Press Photo "Portrait Stories" category with his work from the funeral of Pope Jean Paul II and he won third prize in the Arts and Entertainments section with images from the New York Fashion Week. He is one of the authors of Off Broadway.
For more information, see his page on Magnum.
Lynsey Addario
Lynsey Addario is a photojournalist based in Istanbul, Turkey, where she freelances for The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Time, Newsweek, among others, through her New York-based photo agency, Corbis.
Addario began photographing professionally in 1996, with no professional training or studies, for The Buenos Aires Herald in Argentina. She worked there for one year before returning to New York. In 1997, she began freelancing for the New York Daily News, Newsday, and eventually the Associated Press, where she became a consistent contributor for three years. During her time in New York, Addario completed several overseas self-assignments, with Cuba as a focus.
In January 2000, Addario moved to India. While there she traveled from the main cities in India, dedicating most of her work in South Asia to the treatment of women in the developing world: the life of women under the Taliban, female burn victims in India, and the lives of women along the Ganges River. After spending two years based in Mexico City she she returned to South Asia, where she covered the war in Afghanistan and women's education since the fall of the Taliban, and myriad immigration, human-rights, and social features in Mexico for a variety of publications including The New York Times.
In January 2003, Addario moved to Istanbul, Turkey, in order to situate herself closer to feature and news stories in the Middle East. In February, she traveled to Northern Iraq, where she spent six months covering Northern and Southern Iraq for The New York Times Magazine, Time, and The New York Times. She has recently been working on feature stories in Saudi Arabia.
In 2002, Addario was named the "Young Photographer" of the year by the International Center of Photography, one of the Thirty Best Emerging Photographers by Photo District News Magazine, and was selected and participated along with eleven other photographers in World Press Masterclass in Amsterdam in November 2003.
For more information about her work, visit her Web site.
Helene Caux
Hélène Caux is an independent photojournalist based in New York City since 1994. Born in Amiens, France, she earned a master's degree in American history from Sorbonne University and an advanced degree in journalism from Institut Pratique de Journalisme in Paris. She is currently working on two long-term photography projects: one on cross-dressing and gender representations in New York, the other on refugees in the United States.
Caux has combined humanitarian aid work and photography for the past nine years, traveling for UN agencies to West Africa and the Balkans. In Kosovo, she collaborated with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to produce two photo books. One, A Journey Home, depicts the exodus of Kosovo Albanians to Macedonia and Albania in 1998-99 as well as the daily lives of minority Serbs and Roma after the war. The other, Kosovar Women, is a collection of images about the role of women in rebuilding a peaceful and multiethnic society in Kosovo.
Caux's photographs have appeared in the International Herald Tribune, New Scientist, Amnesty International Press Sweden, Médecins Sans Frontières Kosovo reports, La Vie, and on the UN and UNHCR Web sites. Her work on refugees and women has been exhibited in several galleries in Kosovo. Caux's project "The Freedom of Movement Train: A Multiethnic Kosovo/a Journey" was featured in the Open Society Foundation's Moving Walls 8 exhibit.
For more information about Caux's work in Sudan, visit National Geographic's online photo essay of her work, Surviving Darfur: African Refugee Life.
Michal Ronnen Safdie
Upon her return from the Chad/Darfur, Sudan border, Safdie wrote: "Our first impression is one of devastation, as we gaze at scenes of scattered bodies in destroyed villages, fields and mass graves. While the international community debates whether to use the term genocide (which seems to depend on the number of people killed and the motivation of the killers), the Bahai refugee camp is all about those who survived the killings, the 'lucky.' We might take some comfort in the fact that they have been spared, but what kind of a life are they living, what does the future hold for them?"
For more, visit: http://www.guernicamag.com/art/68/the_bahai_refugee_camp/.
Ryan Spencer Reed
Born in Ludington, MI, Ryan's journey documenting critical social issues began in 2002 after pusuing medicine in college. At which point he sold his car to move to Nairobi, Kenya. After several months there he set foot in the Kakuma regufee camp in northwestern Kenya—home to more than 90,000 refugees from conflicts across East Africa, most of whom are Sudanese from the Southern war. Working exlusively on Sudan since that time, Ryan has entered Sudan a half dozen times in both the south and Darfur, in addition to covering the mass exodus of refugees into Eastern Chad and Kenya.
For more information about his work, visit his Web site.
About the Music
The song accompanying the images is "To the Sudanese Women" by Farah Siraj. It can be found on We are all Connected, a CD produced by Berklee College of Music and Mercy Corps. For more information and to purchase the CD, visit http://www.berklee.edu/darfur/
The We are all connected project began when three women -- Linda Mason, wife of Berklee president Roger Brown; Liz Walker, news anchor for Boston CBS-4; and activist Rev. Dr. Gloria White Hammond -- were planning a trip to Darfur, Sudan, with the relief group Mercy Corps in 2004. Berklee College president Brown proposed the idea for a songwriting competition to the college to create a gift of music and hope for the women and children of Darfur in a way that only Berklee could provide. "To the Sudanese" was among the two winning songs.
Upon hearing the two songs in the refugee camps, the Sudanese women leapt to their feet and began trilling and singing in jubilant musical response. That beautiful outpouring of emotion in melody and rhythm was recorded and brought back to Berklee with Linda Mason. A new songwriting competition was created -- this time the sounds from the Sudanese women were the inspiration, and their voices can be heard throughout this recording. Both the original songs and the new ones incorporating the voices of Darfurian woman are included on the CD.