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Peter N. Turnley (born June 22, 1955)[1] is an American and Frenchphotographer known for documenting the human condition and current events.[2] He is also astreet photographer who has lived in and photographed Paris since 1978.[3]
Turnley's photographs have been used on the cover ofNewsweek more than forty times.[2] He and his twin brother, the photographerDavid C. Turnley, were the subjects of a biographical60 Minutes pieceDouble Exposure,[4] which aired during their exhibition,In Times of War and Peace at New York'sInternational Center of Photography in 1996.
Turnley is a graduate of theUniversity of Michigan, the Sorbonne of Paris, and theInstitut d'études politiques of Paris, one of the few American students ever to do so.[1] He has received honorary doctorates from theNew School of Social Research in New York andUniversity of St Francis (Indiana) and Ohio Wesleyan University.Harvard University awarded him aNieman Fellowship for 2000–2001.[5]
Turnley first began photographing in 1972 in his hometown ofFort Wayne, Indiana. With his twin brother David, he spent a year photographing the life of the inner-city, working-class McClellan Street. This work was published in 2008 byIndiana University Press. In 1975, theOffice of Economic Opportunity of the State of California hired Turnley to produce a photographic documentary on poverty in California.
After an initial sojourn of eight months in Paris in 1975 to 1976, Turnley moved there in 1978.[6] He began working as a printer at the photography lab, Picto. At the same time, he began photographing street scenes in Paris, which resulted in the bookParisians (2001). He began working as the assistant to the photographerRobert Doisneau in 1981 and with Doisneau's introduction to Raymond Grosset, the director of theRapho photo agency, Turnley became a member of Rapho, working alongside many of the photographers of the French school ofhumanist photography. He became associated with theBlack Star photo agency and was mentored by its directorHoward Chapnick.[7] As Paris-based contract photographer forNewsweek from 1984 to 2001, Turnley's photographs appeared on its cover 43 times. In 2003, he began producing eight-page quarterlyphoto-essays forHarper's Magazine.[8]
Turnley has photographed world conflicts including theGulf War,Bosnian War,Somali Civil War,Rwandan genocide,South Africa under apartheid,First Chechen War,Operation Uphold Democracy in Haiti,Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, theIsraeli–Palestinian conflict, Afghanistan,Kosovo War, and Iraq (2003).[5] During the end of theCold War (1985–1991) Turnley photographed Soviet leaderMikhail Gorbachev more than any other Western journalist.[6] He witnessed the fall of theBerlin Wall and the revolutions inEastern Europe in 1989,Nelson Mandela's walk out of prison after 27 years incarceration, and the ensuing end ofapartheid in South Africa. Turnley was also present inNew York City at "Ground Zero" on September 11, 2001, and in New Orleans during the aftermath ofHurricane Katrina. He photographed the election and inauguration of PresidentBarack Obama and produced a multimedia piece on this occasion forCNN.[9]
In 2015, Turnley was the first American artist since the Cuban revolution to be given a major exposition at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Havana.[10]
In 2020, Turnley created a visual diary in New York City and Paris, France, which resulted in a book "A New York-Paris Visual Diary: The Human Face of Covid-19. A selection of this work was a headline exhibition at the International Photojournalism FestivalVisa Pour L'Image in Perpignan, France in 2020.[11]
During the fall of 2001 Turnley was a Teaching Fellow for ProfessorRobert Coles for his class "The Literature of Social Reflection" atHarvard, and he is a frequent lecturer and teacher at universities and on panels worldwide, including the Danish National School of Journalism,Parsons School of Design, Paris, the University of Hanover, Germany,The University of Michigan,The University of Iowa, andIndiana University. He was anartist-in-residence at the Residential College of the University of Michigan during the spring semester of 2008.
He teaches workshops onstreet photography and the photo-essay in Paris, New York City, and Venice.
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