Guillaume Bonn

Guillaume Bonn (born October 6, 1970) is a documentary photographer, author, and filmmaker of French and Malagasy descent.

Bonn's work has focused on conflicts, social issues, and environmental challenges, particularly across Africa. Bonn began his career in the 1990s documenting the conflict in Mogadishu, Somalia. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Economist, Newsweek, and Le Monde and co-directed a documentary about his friend Peter Beard. He is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

Early life Bonn was born in 1970 in Antananarivo, Madagascar. His French great-grandfather was a military officer and a colonial administrator and his great-grandmother a Malagasy woman. Eldon was killed in Mogadishu on July 12, 1993, while reporting on what would later become known as the "Bloody Monday" raid, conducted by the U.S. military.

Bonn, alongside journalist Marc Lacey, has reported on the Darfur conflict in Sudan, allegations of child sexual abuse by United Nations peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Bonn's work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Le Monde, the Guardian the Observer and other newspapers and magazines. From 2002 to 2017, Bonn was a contributor to Vanity Fair for 15 years during Graydon Carter's tenure as editor-in-chief.

Bonn has received two grants from the Pulitzer Center for two photography projects on Kenya. His grant work, "Kenya: The Landscape of Turkana County" featured in Newsweek in 2014 in collaboration with Jessica Hatcher. Bonn has won numerous prizes for his photography. He has also been nominated three times for the Prix Pictet (Pictet Prize) in 2012, 2014, and 2015. He was also a finalist for the Lucie Photo Book Prize in 2024.

Bonn has also authored several books, including Mosquito Coast: Travels from Maputo to Mogadishu. His most recent book, Paradise Inc, featuring an introduction by Jon Lee Anderson, was first published in 2024. Bonn co-directed, with Jean-Claude Luyat, a Canal+ documentary about his friend Peter Beard, entitled Peter Beard: Scrapbooks from Africa & Beyond. Bonn would later recall his friendship with Beard in The Gentleman's Journal .Bonn is also fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

Writing about his book, Mosquito Coast, Eleanor Brugioni wrote "the title... most evidently represents is a clear analogy between Bonn's photographic and visual work and the literary genre of travel literature, where the African continent indisputably stands out as a geographical and aesthetic literary paradigm."

Jon Lee Anderson writes in The New Yorker: "Like an archeologist, Bonn has the urge to seek out and preserve whatever amounts to a legacy of the past in East Africa. The difference is that he takes pictures, and that the past he seeks to record is quite a recent one."

Publications

Books (Monographs)

Paradise Inc, Hemeria 1st Ed. (French) 2024; Revised edition (English) 2025 . Munk, Nina (2013) The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty. Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-385-52581-7 Nairobi 24'', Kwani, 2008

Awards Bonn has won a number of awards including: PDN Photo Annual, USA, 2007 POPCAP12 African Contemporary Photography, 2012 American Photography Winner (35), 2018 He has also been the recipient of two grants from the Pulitzer Center.