Jon Lowenstein (USA, 1970) is a professional photographer specializing 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 his work, and by his own admission, is a lighted love of people. An equally intractable believer in the arts, he asks those who consider photography unessential to picture a world with no pictures.
For more than a decade Jon 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 show the real stories of the men and women who make up the largest transnational migration in world history.
Jon has been documenting the South Side Chicago community for the past 10 years and his recent work includes stories from Central America, Haiti and Uganda.
Recently, Jon was a recipient of the 2011 John Simon Memorial Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in the field of Photography. He is also currently a 2011 TED Global Fellow. In 2012, he was the winner of the Editorial Section of the Hasselblad Masters Awards.
Widely recognized, he received the Nikon Sabbatical Grant in 2003, was a 2004 World Press Photo Award winner, won the 58th NPPA’s Pictures of the Year Magazine Photographer of the Year Award, as well as the Fuji Community Awareness Award and the 2005 NPPA New America Award. In 2007, Jon was named as a USC Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism Racial Justice Fellowship. Jon has won numerous awards, including the Getty Images Grant for Editorial Photography and World Press Photo Award. He was also named the Joseph P. Albright Fellow by the Alicia Patterson Foundation in 2008 and in 2013 received the Audience Engagement Grant from the Open Society for Shadow Lives.
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.
Jon is member and co-owner of NOOR photo agency and foundation, he resides in Chicago.
