Lori Grinker Biography

Lori Grinker (1957) is an award-winning American documentary photographer from New York City. She is best known for her self-directed, long-term documentary projects, and has conducted these projects through photography, video and multimedia. Grinker has been exhibited and published internationally, garnering many awards, including a World Press Photo Foundation Prize, an Open Society Institute Distribution grant, the Ernst Hass Grant, a W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund fellowship, The Santa Fe Center for Photography Project Grant, and a Hasselblad Foundation Grant, among others. Her work has been featured in Life, The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, People, The Sunday Times Magazine (London), Stern, and GEO (among others).

Grinker studied photography at Parsons School of Design in New York City with Bernice Abbott, George Tice, and Lisette Model. She has been a member of Contact Press Images since 1988. While at Parsons, she conducted a photo essay on boxers who worked with boxing trainer Cus D'Amato. Although her project focused on nine-year old pugilist Billy Hamm, she also met 13 year-old Mike Tyson during this time, and would continue to photograph him for the next ten years, including his 1988 Sports Illustrated Magazine Cover. Grinker also covered 9/11, and took one of her most well-known photographs of firefighters raising the flag at Ground Zero during this time.

Grinker has published two books: The Invisible Thread: A Portrait of Jewish American Women (co-authored with writer Diana Bletter) and Afterwar: Veterans from a World in Conflict. For The Invisible Thread she traveled across America documenting the stories of Jewish women and what tied them together. Afterwar: Veterans from a World in Conflict is an exploration of the effects of war on its many actors and victims after the wars have ended. In 2012 Grinker worked on her first short documentary, The Little Freedom Church (for the Black Heritage Network) and in January 2013, Grinker completed a multimedia piece called Wilderness After War for the Dart Society about the effects of PTSD on three former U.S. service members. This video, produced and directed by Grinker, was featured on PBS Newshour. Grinker also teaches at the International Center for Photography and is a lecturer at Yale. Her current photography project is Distant Relations, which explores, through landscapes, interiors, and environmental portraits, her family's diaspora.