Benjamin Lowy

Benjamin Lowy (born 1979) is an American photojournalist. He is best known for his work as a conflict photographer in war zones, and is one of the early adopters of and a vocal proponent for mobile photography.

Early life and education Lowy was born in New York City, a first-generation American. He attended the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, receiving a BFA in 2002. He was heavily influenced by Inferno, a book of James Nachtwey's war crimes photos from the 1990s.

Career

Iraq War Shortly after graduating from college, Lowy was hired by the Corbis photo agency and assigned to cover the Iraq War for Time magazine. He was 23 at the time. He covered the war from 2003 to 2008, embedded with numerous units of the American and Iraqi military.

In 2011, Lowy was awarded the Duke University Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography, appearing on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to promote the related book, Iraq | Perspectives. The book documents his time covering the Iraq war, with profiles of the US soldiers' experiences as seen from their points of view, along with photos of everyday life in the war-torn country. The photos in the first chapter were shot exclusively through armored military vehicle windows, and the second chapter is composed of photos he took with a DSLR attached to a pair of night vision goggles. His Hipstamatic photos of militia in Afghanistan appeared alongside a separate article in The New York Times that same month. Preferring their "rich palette and high contrast," the Times chose to use Lowy's iPhone photos over his 35-millimeter photos.

His photos taken in Libya's war zone were published as a photoblog on NBC News online, and were also featured in GQ. Social media played a large role in the story, as he first published his iPhone photos from Libya in real-time on Tumblr.

iPhone photography and use of social media Lowy started out primarily using 35-millimeter digital SLRs, before becoming a pioneer of cellphone photography. He is a vocal proponent of the Instagram and Hipstamatic apps, and in-camera digital processing in general. He began shooting on an iPhone in 2008, shortly after it first came out, and began using the Hipstamatic app around the time it launched in 2010.

After shooting in Libya using iPhone, DSLR and Holga cameras, Lowy suggested to Hipstamatic that the company create a new lens and filter combination better suited for photojournalism, that would be more acceptable for Hipstamatic critics in photojournalism. He collaborated with the company on the new filter, which has minimal processing, was released in 2012 and named The Lowy Lens.

Lowy has been publicly defending cellphone photography since 2009, viewing it as an artistic choice, much like photographers who choose black and white film over color. Lowy covered the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill for GQ. To cover the vast spill, he focused on the oil collected on the water's surface, shooting the psychedelic shapes in extreme close ups and abstract compositions, in an attempt to pique the viewer's curiosity. He also documented the cleanup and the toll the spill took on the environment. His behind the scenes photos of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart appeared on RollingStone.com in 2011. He covered the 2012 Republican and Democratic National Conventions for The New Yorker. He has also covered stories in Darfur, Chad, Haiti, Indonesia and China.

Exhibitions Open Society Foundations, Moving Walls 16, New York, 2009

Awards Photo District News 30, 2004 Oskar Barnack Award finalist, 2009 Pictures of the Year International, Sports Picture Story, First Place, 2009