John Pendygraft is a photographer, anthropologist and educator. His recent work embraces wet plate photography as applied anthropology and visual storytelling. The slow, inefficient chemical process, which dates to 1850, is used as an opportunity to create images collaboratively with subjects. Along the way, people are invited to share their life story and acknowledge erasures of heritage, identity and communal history. He is the author of Lost Storytellers (2022) and his documentary uncovering abuses in Florida’s mental health system helped win a Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Journalism (2016). Pendygraft has received national awards for feature writing, video and still photography from the American Society of News Editors, Society of Professional Journalists, Scripps Howard, National Headliner Awards, Pictures of the Year International and the Emmy awards. He holds a PhD in applied anthropology, has been recognized with numerous journalism awards over a two-decade career as a newspaper photographer, completed a Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan in 2018, and is a professor at Penn State’s Bellisario College of Communications.
Please contact him at Johnpendygraft@gmail.com.