Ken Light

Ken Light is a social documentary photographer whose work has appeared in books, magazines and exhibitions. His most recent book Texas Death Row (University Press of Mississippi) was published in the Fall of 1997. Texas Death Row is a look at life inside the death house as the condemned wait to be executed in Americas largest and most active Death Row. This work was published in Newsweek Magazine (6 pgs), Paris Match (France -- 8 pgs), Tempo (Germany -- 6 pgs), London Telegraph, Nieuwe Revu (Amsterdam -- 6 pgs) and in Japan, Korea, Holland, Denmark, Mexico, Spain, Italy as well as on Newsweek Online (Prodigy), MSNBC Online and Mojo Wire.

He is also the author of Delta Time published in 1995 by the Smithsonian Institution Press. This book looks at rural black poverty, cotton and the southern landscape. Delta Time has 104 photographs and an essay by legendary civil rights organizer Bob Moses. This work has been published in VSD in Paris, Granta, the London Independent, Spanish Elle with Walker Evans, and in the Academy Award-nominated documentary film Freedom on My Mind.

His other books are To The Promised Land (Aperture 1988), With These Hands (Pilgrim Press 1986), In the Fields (Harvest Press 1982), which examine the lives of farm workers and their illegal journey from Mexico to the United States, and Witness In Our Time: The Lives of Social Documentary Photographers (Smithsonian Institution Press 2000).

His newest book, Coal Hollow, features text by Melanie Light and an introduction by Robert Reich. Represented by Contact Press Images, the book will be published by UC Press in 2006.

Light has exhibited internationally in over 120 one-person and group shows and is part of numerous collections including the San Francisco MOMA, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the International Center of Photography and the American Museum of Art at the Smithsonian. He has received two National Endowments for the Arts Photographers Fellowships, the Dorothea Lange Fellowship and a fellowship from the Erna and Victor Hasselblad Foundation. Light's numerous other awards include the Media Alliance Meritorious Achievement award in photography, the Thomas More Storke International Journalism Award and Judges Special Recognition (Cannon Photo Essayist) in the 1991 University of Missouri/NPPA Pictures of the Year competition.

He is an adjunct professor and director of the Center for Photography at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California Berkeley, and has taught workshops at the ICP in New York City, The Missouri Photo Workshop and in the School for Photographic Studies in Prague and Baltimore. He is a founder of the International Fund for Documentary Photography which awards grants to photographers worldwide. His freelance work is represented by SABA Press Photos in New York.
 

See more at KenLight.com