2004 Infinity Award: Photojournalism

Simon Norfolk was born in Lagos, Nigeria in 1963, and today lives in London. He studied at Oxford and Bristol in the late 1980s, and worked as a staff photographer for far-left magazines from 1990 to 1994. In the 1990s, he traveled throughout Europe, covering issues related to racism, Northern Ireland, the Fall of the Berlin Wall, and resistance to the Gulf War. His photographs have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Sunday Times Magazine (London), The Guardian, The South China Morning Post, and La Republicca Magazine.

In the 1990s, Norfolk abandoned traditional photojournalism in favor of capturing landscapes shaped by war and genocide. Primarily concerned with the aftermath of conflict—buildings freshly bombed, wounded civilians, refugees—Norfolk creates epic portraits that are more contemplative than instantaneous. In "Scenes from a 'Liberated' Baghdad", images of damaged architecture and a street corner where five civilian boys were recently killed by an American grenade suggest the abstract nature of war, as well as its lasting effects. By focusing on things rather than people, Norfolk's photography allows the viewer to step back and consider the consequences of war, rather than inducing them to react viscerally to individual moments of horror. Norfolk's recent work has focused on refugees and refugee camps in Pakistan, Chad, Beirut, Ingushetia, and Bosnia. His pictures from war-torn Afghanistan, published in the book Afghanistan: chronotopia, won the 2002 European Publishers Award and a shortlisting for the 2003 Citibank Photography Prize. His work published in The New York Times Magazine won the Foreign Press Club of America Olivier Rebbot Award in 2003.