Judah Passow has
been working on assignments for American and European magazines and newspapers
since 1978.
Based in London, his work has been
published extensively by all of the leading British newspapers and their
associated magazines, including the Guardian, the Observer, the Times and
Sunday Times, the Daily and Sunday Telegraph and the Independent. Abroad, he
has contributed regularly to Time, Newsweek and the New York Times in America,
Der Spiegel and Die Zeit in Germany, Elsevier magazine and De Volkskraant in
Holland, Das Magazin in Switzerland and L'Express in France.
A winner of four
World Press Photo awards for his coverage of conflict in the Middle East, his
photographs have been exhibited in London, York, Leeds, Glasgow, Amsterdam,
Paris, Arles, Perpignan, Tel Aviv, New York, and Washington D.C.
In 1995 Passow
formed Further Vision, a new media production company, to explore the
possibilities for combining traditional photojournalism with digital
technology. His CD-ROM, Days Of Rage, based on his work in Beirut from 1982 to 1985, received critical
acclaim in the British press for its journalistic integrity and technological
innovation.
He was an Artist
In Residence at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London
in 1998, where he directed the New Media Centre's Digital Photojournalism
Laboratory, and has served as a consultant to the Soros Foundation's Open
Society Institute, training photojournalists on newspapers in the former Eastern Europe. He is a frequent lecturer on
photojournalism at British universities.
His book Shattered
Dreams, looking back at twenty five years of his coverage of the Israeli/Palestinian
conflict, was published in 2008 and accompanied by major exhibitions in London, Hamburg and Jerusalem. It was
nominated for the Deutsche Borse Photography Prize.
Passow graduated
from Boston University
in the United States
in 1971.
Photography critic
Steve Mayes noted in Reuel Golden's book "Witness: The World's Greatest
News Photographers", that "Judah Passow has an extraordinary ability
to distil complex situations into powerfully loaded images that are deceptively
simple to look at. He starts with a conceptual overview of a political or
social situation and looks for circumstances that demonstrate the human
reality, producing clean, graphic frames that combine metaphor and actuality.
His signature black-and-white technique has cut-glass clarity and beauty with a
sensual quality that seduces the viewer to engage with even the grimmest
reality. He is driven to extremes of professional endeavour by his idealistic
belief in the power of photography and technical perfectionism."
