Peter Turnley is renown for his compassionate documentation of the realities of the human condition worldwide. His photographs have been on the cover of Newsweek 43 times and are published frequently in the world’s most prestigious publications. He has worked in over 90 countries and has documented most major stories of international geo-political and historic significance these past thirty years. His photographs draw poignant attention to the plight of people that deserve greater attention for their suffering of hardship or injustice. He also affirms with his vision the many aspects of the life that are beautiful, poetic, just, and inspirational.

Often featured in Newsweek, Harper’s, Stern, Paris Match, Geo, LIFE, National Geographic, The London Sunday Times, VSD, Le Figaro, Le Monde, The New Yorker, and DoubleTake, Turnley is a master of the photographic essay. Peter Turnley worked as a contract photographer for Newsweek Magazine from 1984-2001 and as a contributing editor/photographer with Harper’s Magazine from 2003-2007. His work is frequently published in photo essay form in magazines, on major television networks such as CNN, ABC’s "Nightline", and online publications, such as The Online Photographer. Turnley’s photos have been published the world over and have won many international awards including the Overseas Press Club Award for Best Photographic Reporting from Abroad, numerous awards and citations from World Press Photo, and the University of Missouri’s Pictures of the Year competition.

Turnley has photographed most of the world’s conflicts of the last decades including the Gulf War-1991, the Balkans (Bosnia), Somalia, Rwanda, South Africa, Chechnya, Haiti, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Kosovo, the war in Iraq-2003, and also maintains an ongoing documentation of the major refugee populations of the world. He witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989, the liberation of Nelson Mandela and the end of apartheid in South Africa. He was in New York "Ground Zero" on Sept 11, 2001, New Orleans during the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, Haiti after the tragic earthquake of 2011, and Egypt during the toppling of Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Turnley has produced portraits and covered many of the modern world’s most influential people; Obama, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin, Mandela, Arafat, Schroeder, Ceausescu, Gaddafi, Chirac, Clinton, Reagan, Bush Sr, Lady Diana, and Pope Jean Paul II among others.

At the same time, since 1975, Turnley has continually photographed the life of Paris, his adopted home. Turnley was born in America, but has lived more than half his life in Paris. His tender, humoristic and sensual view "The City of Light" offers distinct contrast to the stark realities depicted in his photojournalism. He has photographed the life of Paris as much as anyone of his generation and his fine art prints are collected worldwide. Turnley worked as the assistant to the famous French photographer Robert Doisneau in his early days in Paris in the early 1980’s. He is among a rare breed of contemporary photographers whose body of photography bridges both the worlds of photojournalism and fine art.

A graduate of the University of Michigan, the Sorbonne of Paris, and the Institut d’Etudes Politiques of Paris, Turnley has received Honorary Doctorate degrees from the New School of Social Research in New York and St. Francis College of Indiana. He received a Nieman Fellowship from Harvard for the academic year 2000-2001. During the fall of 2001, Turnley was a Teaching Fellow for Professor Robert Coles for his class “The Literature of Social Reflection” at Harvard. In 2005, he received the Indiana Governor’s Arts Award. Turnley is a frequent lecturer and teacher at Universities and to groups worldwide, including Harvard, The University of Michigan, The Danish National School of Journalism, Parsons School of Design, Paris, The University of Hanover, Germany, The University of Iowa, and Indiana University.

Widely respected as a teacher of photography workshops worldwide, Turnley helps students develop visual storytelling narrative in photo essay form. He teaches workshops on street photography and the photo-essay in Paris, Istanbul, Seville, Rio, Calcutta, Buenos Aires, New York, Mumbai, Venice, and Havana.

Turnley’s commercial photography has received recognition for its sense of authenticity and spontaneity. He has been commissioned to photograph for clients such as Coca-Cola, Nike, The Bank of America, Harley-Davidson, the National Ad Council, and NYU Langone Medical Center. With attention to the richness of real life situations and human stories, Turnley employs a documentary/photojournalistic approach and style to commercial assignments.

Peter Turnley continues to photograph and teach photography workshops worldwide. He presently lives in both New York and Paris, and has published five books of his work; Beijing Spring, Moments of Revolution, In Times of War and Peace, Parisians and McClellan Street. His lifelong photography archive consists of more than 25,000 images. Turnley’s most recent and on-going work is represented by Corbis and can be found online at Corbis.com