Ed Kashi
Ed Kashi began his career in 1979 after graduating from Syracuse University with a degree in photojournalism. Working in the tradition of humanistic documentary photography, he has completed personal essays on the heroin problem in Poland, culture and nightlife in the reunified Berlin, the return of Soviet vets from the Afghan war, overpopulation in Cairo's City of the Dead, the motorbike culture of Saigon and the Christian pilgrimage sight in Conyers, Georgia.

Ed spent three years (1988-1991) producing his first major photographic project, an essay on the Loyalist community in Northern Ireland for which he received a 1991 WESTAF NEA grant and self-published the work in a book titled The Protestants: No Surrender.

Since 1991 Ed's attention has been focused primarily on issues in the Middle East while working with National Geographic. These efforts have resulted intwo cover stories, one on the Kurds and another on water problems in the Middle East. He's also produced stories on Syria, the Crimea, and a rafting expedition on the Shilou He River in Tibet. (Syria and Shilou He will be published in 1996.) The Kurds, a story Ed researched and proposed to National Geographic, has since been published in a book When the Borders Bleed: The Struggle of the Kurds (Pantheon Books) co-authored with Christopher Hitchens. The Kurds and Northern Ireland have both been widely exhibited.
Ed is currently working on a long-term project examining the life of Jewish settlers living in the West Bank. One of the photographs from this series received an honorable mention in the World Press Photo 1995 competition.

Between editorial assignments and personal projects, Ed lectures around the country on photojournalism and documentary photography and participates in related forums. Since 1992 he has given several workshops and seminars, including Master Workshops at The Friends of Photography in San Francisco, and a lecture and workshop at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York.

Ed's work has appeared in National Geographic, Time, Fortune, Geo, Life, Smithsonian, London Independent Magazine, Newsweek, Forbes, Vanity Fair, N.Y. Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Audubon, Granta, Aperture among many other domestic and international publications.