2009 Activist Awards Judges

Ken Light

Ken Light has worked as a freelance documentary photographer, focusing primarily on social issues facing America for 40 years. His work has been published in seven books, including Delta Time, To The Promised Land, With These Hands, Texas Death Row and most recently Coal Hollow. He is also the author of the text Witness in Our Time: Lives of Documentary photographers. His work has been in numerous photo essays in newspapers, magazines and a variety of media (electronic & film), and presented in exhibitions worldwide including a one person show at the International Center for Photography (NYC), S.E. Museum of Photography, and the San Jose Museum of Art. He is an adjunct Professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at U.C. Berkeley and director for its Center for Photography, and co-founder of Fotovision, and the International Fund for Documentary photography.

Ed Kashi

Ed Kashi is a photojournalist, filmmaker and educator dedicated to documenting the social and political issues that define our times. A sensitive eye and an intimate relationship to his subjects are the signatures of his work. Kashi’s images have been published and exhibited worldwide. His innovative approach to photography and filmmaking produced the Iraqi Kurdistan Flipbook. Using stills in a moving image format, this creative and thought provoking form of visual storytelling has been shown in many film festivals and as part of a series of exhibitions on the Iraq War at The George Eastman House. Also, an eight-year personal project completed in 2003, Aging in America: The Years Ahead, created a traveling exhibition, an award-winning documentary film, a website and a book which was named one of the best photo books of 2003 by American Photo. Along with numerous awards, including honors from Pictures of the Year International, World Press Foundation, Communication Arts and American Photography, Kashi’s editorial assignments and personal projects have generated four books, including: Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta and Three. Kashi has just been named as one of 12 finalists for the 2009 Prix Pictet for his work in the Niger Delta. In 2002, Kashi and his wife, writer / filmmaker Julie Winokur, founded Talking Eyes Media. The non-profit company has produced numerous short films and multimedia pieces that explore significant social issues.

Robert Holmes

Robert Holmes launched his distinguished career covering the 1975 British Everest Expedition for the London Daily Mail. The following year he visited California for the first time at the invitation of Ansel Adams and in 1979 he moved to Mill Valley, California where he still lives. He has since traveled the world for major magazines, including National Geographic, Life, Time, Travel + Leisure and Geo. Widely recognized as one of the world's foremost travel photographers, his accomplishments were acknowledged when he was invited to be one of the World’s 100 best photojournalists to participate in A Day in the Life of Africa. He was the first person to twice receive the Travel Photographer of the Year Award from the Society of American Travel Writers. Holmes has searched for snow leopards in the remote valleys of western Nepal for National Geographic Magazine, journeyed into the rain forests of Borneo with Penan tribesmen for Islands magazine and crossed the Great Indian Desert on camel for Departures. Willie Landels, former editor of Departures called Holmes "one of the most intelligent photographers I have worked with, who also has a remarkable sense of color and design." He is not only an accomplished photographer but also a gifted teacher and speaker. He is founding chair of the photography faculty of the Annual Travel Writers and Photographers Conference in California and his frequent speaking engagements have seen him sharing headlines with legends such as William Albert Allard, the late Galen Rowell and Chris Rainier.

Sandra S. Phillips

Sandra S. Phillips, senior curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, has organized numerous exhibitions including retrospectives of work by Sebastiao Salgado, Helen Levitt, John Gutmann, Dorothea Lange, William Klein, Diane Arbus, Robert Adams, and Daido Moriyama, and group exhibitions such as Police Pictures: The Photograph as Evidence and Crossing the Frontier: Photography and the Developing West, 1849 to the present.

Susie Tompkins Buell

Susie Tompkins Buell was the founder and co-owner of the Esprit clothing company, which was known for its revolutionary fusion of corporate mission with social responsibility. The Esprit Foundation was created in 1990 and supported a variety of organizations in areas such as at-risk youth, AIDS awareness and direct care, women’s issues and the environment.

When Susie Tompkins Buell left Esprit in 1996, she took the Foundation with her and eventually renamed it the Susie Tompkins Buell Foundation. The Foundation retained the original mission and areas of funding, including a “women and girls lens”, which screened organizations for their inclusion of women and girls, not only as recipient of services but also for their representation on boards and staff.

Today the Susie Tompkins Buell Foundation carries on the original spirit of innovation and social responsibility in its grant-making interests and practices. Among the organizations the foundation supported for the past 10 years is the The Center for Photography at the University of Berkeley, a Bay Area destination for top photographers and aspiring photojournalists.

Susie Tompkins Buell is an avid photography collector and says that from the work of Dorothea Lange, Tina Modotti and Edward Weston she has found “the inspiration to do the work that I do".

Gordon Wiltsie

Gordon Wiltsie is a photographer, writer, mountaineer and explorer whose work has taken him to some of earth's wildest and remotest regions, including numerous journeys to the Himalaya, the Andes, Canadian arctic, Antarctica and both geographic Poles. He is widely considered to be one of the most creative and prolific expedition photographers in the world and his work appears regularly in such international publications as National Geographic, Travel and Leisure, Outside, Geo, American Photographer, Terre Sauvage, Life, and most leading adventure magazines. Among numerous other exhibits, his photography has been featured twice at Visa Pour Image in Perpignan, France; MountainFilm in Telluride, Colorado; the Centre for Mountain Culture in Banff, Alberta; The Arts Club of Washington, DC.; and the United Nations Headquarters. He was just awarded the 2008 Lowell Thomas Award for “Best Photography of a Magazine Travel Story,” for pictures he took for National Geographic Adventure Magazine of the vanishing Komi Reindeer herders of the Russian Arctic. In October 2006, W.W. Norton and Company published a book of his best expedition photography and stories entitled “To the Ends of the Earth – Adventures of an Expedition Photographer.” When not traveling on distant assignments he lives in Bozeman, Montana with his wife Meredith and two sons, where he divides his time between writing, advertising photography, lecturing and photo seminars.