Simon Norfolk is a landscape photographer whose work over the last ten years has been themed around a probing and stretching of the meaning of the word ‘battlefield’ in all its forms. As such, he has photographed in some of the world’s worst war zones and refugee crises, but is equally at home photographing supercomputers used to design military systems or test launches of nuclear missiles.

His work has been widely recognised: he has won Le Prix Dialogue at Les Rencontres d’Arles in 2005; The Infinity Prize from The International Center of Photography in 2004; the Foreign Press Club of America Award in 2003: and he was winner of the European Publishing Award, 2002. In 2003 he was shortlisted for the Citibank Prize now known as the Deutsche Bourse Prize.

He has produced three monographs of his work including Afghanistan:chronotopia (2002) which was published in 5 languages; For Most Of It I Have No Words (1998) about the landscapes of genocide and Bleed (2005) about the war in Bosnia.

He has work held in major collections such as The Museum of Fine Art, Houston and Deutsche Bourse Art Collection in Frankfurt and the collection of the British Council.

He has been described by one critic as ‘the leading documentary photographer of our time. Passionate, intelligent and political; there is no one working in photography that has his vision or his clarity’.

Image by Simon Norfolk

Posted by Thaddeus Pope

Thaddeus Pope is the Director of Visual Communications for The International Academic Forum (IAFOR) and the Creative Director of the IAFOR Documentary Photography Award.