Berman's first monograph, Purple Hearts-Back From Iraq, features portraits and interviews with U.S. soldiers wounded in the war. It was published by Trolley in 2004 and received wide acclaim. The book was made into a feature-length documentary film of the same name and screened worldwide.
Her work has been the subject of several solo and group exhibitions at galleries and museums in New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., and throughout Europe.
Berman is on the faculty of the International Center of Photography in her hometown of New York City.

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Jonathan Blair began his photography career taking pictures of stars at Northwestern University's Dearborn Observatory. While on a trip to help set up an observing station near White Sands, New Mexico, he discovered a passion for landscape photography.
Soon after, Blair transferred to New York's Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) to pursue a degree in illustrative photography. But a summer position with the National Park Service in Yosemite National Park led to him becoming the park's photographer and, later, a park ranger.
While a ranger, Blair worked on several publications for the U.S. Department of the Interior, which helped him gain credit toward his B.A. in fine arts and photography from RIT, as well as an internship at National Geographic magazine.

Blair's first published photographs in National Geographic included images from Yosemite National Park and other locations in California.. Following his internship, the Society sent him to Asia Minor, Africa, and Europe.
During the 1970s, Blair established himself as a contract photographer with the National Geographic Society and began specializing in adventure stories that took him from the Berkshires to the Mediterranean. He also developed new skills in underwater photography while working on stories including "The Last Dive of I-52," which took him to a record-breaking 17,000 feet (5,180 meters) beneath the Atlantic.

Some of Jonathan's Pictures:

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What freelance photographer Ray Gehman remembers most about growing up is always being outside; wandering through the woods, lost in the leaves; lying in the grass, looking up; or sitting in a tree, looking down.
During his early years in school, his eyes were glued to the windows daydreaming about being outside. One day, in fourth grade, the curtains on the windows were drawn, and Gehman saw his first slide show. It was about the Arctic, and it was presented by a visiting National Geographic photographer. Gehman was nine years old, and the seed was sown.
"I was mesmerized," he says. "Not just by the images, but also by the idea that this guy's job was outside and in strange, faraway places. And then as I walked home after school, it clicked that this rugged, bearded photographer worked for the same outfit as that yellow magazine that was always on my parents' coffee table."
Another nine years passed before he would press the shutter button of a camera.

On his 18th birthday, he got a Polaroid camera. From the first click and whir, he was hooked. "It was one of the most natural feelings I'd ever had," he says.
Another nine years passed, and then Gehman, fresh out of journalism school, walked into National Geographic for a summer photo-internship.
Gehman can still be found wandering forests and fields, drawn by natural golden light as it eloquently etches the shape of the landscape. His passion is photographing this radiant light as it illuminates and energizes the natural world. He photographs scenes that could be from this year or a thousand years in the past-or a thousand years in the future.

Some of Raymond's Pictures:

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Stephen Ferry

Stephen Ferry was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As a child, he witnessed the riots and protests against the Vietnam War that rocked the streets of Cambridge, giving him a lifelong passion for observing political and social movements firsthand.
Ferry has traveled to dozens of countries, concentrating on issues of human rights, social and political unrest, and environmental destruction. He takes a long-term approach, preferring to return again and again to a place long after the headlines have faded.
Since the late 1980s, he has covered major historical processes and events, such as the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the rise of radical Islam in Northern Africa, the destruction of rain forests in Brazil and the United States, and the September 11, 2001, terror attacks on New York City, along with stories in nearly every Latin American country.
He is currently focused on documenting, over a period of years, Colombia's ongoing civil war. His work there is supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism, the Knight International Press Fellowship, and the Alicia Patterson Fellowship.
Ferry has received many honors, including two World Press Photo awards and numerous first prizes in the Pictures of the Year competition. His book on the Quechua silver miners of Potosi, Bolivia, I Am Rich Potosi: The Mountain That Eats Men, was published in 1999. He is currently preparing Tayrona, a book portraying the struggles of the indigenous peoples of the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta in Colombia, based on his October 2004 National Geographic article, "Keepers of the World."
Recognized as a distinguished teacher of documentary photography, Ferry is on the faculty of the Fundación para un Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano (founded by Gabriel García Márquez in 1995 in Cartagena, Colombia) and of the International Center of Photography in New York. In 2005, he received the prestigious Howard Chapnick Grant and a National Geographic Expeditions Council grant to help a group of indigenous leaders from Colombia use photography in defense of their land.

Some of Stephen's Pictures:

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Carsten Peter, a World Press Photo award winner and regular contributor to National Geographic magazine, specializes in going to extremes: scuba diving in a glacier on Mont Blanc, crossing the Sahara on a camel, caving in Borneo. He searches for wild places where his survival depends on his wits and his skills as a technical climber, paraglider, caver, diver, and canyoneer.
He is enthusiastically obsessed with devising innovative photographic techniques to capture never-before-seen images from some of the scariest environments on the planet. His many adventures include braving toxic caverns and acid waterfalls to shoot within the deepest ice shafts on Earth, rappelling into active volcanoes with turbulent lava lakes and superheated thermal caves, and breaking altitude records while flying his motorized paraglider.
In addition to his World Press award-for his coverage of tornadoes while storm-chasing in the U.S. West-he has received an Emmy Award for his videography from inside an active volcano in the South Pacific. His images have been published in National Geographic and other magazines.

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Mark Moffett

Contract photographer Mark Moffett has developed a career that combines science and photography, in spite of being a high school dropout. Although his family was not academic, encouraged by his parents he sought out biologists by the age of 12. Soon he became a field assistant on research projects across Latin America.
After entering and eventually earning his B.A. at Beloit College in Wisconsin, Moffett taught himself macrophotography to document his 1989 Harvard Ph.D. under Professor E.O. Wilson on marauder ants. His first published images were of these ants in National Geographic magazine.
Upon completing his doctorate Moffett spent two years as curator of ants at Harvard. Still based at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, his research presently concerns insect and spider social behavior and the structure and dynamics of forest ecosystems, particularly their canopies. Recently he has been investigating canopies of the super-tall coniferous forests of the Pacific Northwest, for which he led (with Professor Steve Sillet of Humboldt College) the first-ever ascent and study of the world's tallest tree, known as the National Geographic redwood.
In 1993 Harvard University Press published Moffett's book, The High Frontier: Exploring the Tropical Rainforest Canopy. Today his research and National Geographic photography are interspersed with writing and public lecturing about rain forests.

Stuart Franklin was born July 16, 1956, in London, England. After studying photography at Oxford Polytechnic and West Surrey College of Art and Design, Franklin went on to photograph news and current affairs for Sygma Agence Presse in Paris from 1980 to 1985.
He joined Magnum Photos in 1985, covering subjects such as the U.S. involvement in Honduras, unemployment in Japan, and flooding in Sudan. He won a World Press Photo award for his now famous 1989 photo of a man standing up to a tank in China's Tiananmen Square.
Franklin began working with National Geographic in 1990, covering more than 20 assignments for the magazine on such subjects as Inca conqueror Francisco Pizarro, Shanghai, the hydro-struggle in Quebec, Buenos Aires, and Malaysia.
His book projects include Tiananmen Square, The Time of Trees, The Dynamic City, and Sea Fever.
Franklin's other projects include going to Antarctica with Greenpeace in 1989 and participating in the Photographer's Gallery project on London in 1991. He won the Christian Aid Award for Humanitarian Photography in 1985 and third prize in the World Press Photo award for spot news stories in 1991.
Franklin received his Ph.D. in geography from the University of Oxford in 2002. He lives in that city.

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Jason Edwards began his career in wildlife and natural history photography during an 11-year career with the Zoological Board of Victoria in Australia, working as a carnivore and primate husbandry specialist.
In 1991 he established the stock agency Bio-Images in Melbourne as a platform to market and deliver his work to clients globally.
Edwards's reputation for self-reliance and his ability to adapt has seen him placed on assignment in some of the world's most remote areas. He is highly regarded for his wildlife and remote landscape photography and for his images of indigenous peoples. An ideal shoot, he says, is as remote and as far afield from "civilization" as he can travel before he runs out of film.
He has photographed in more than two dozen countries. His work has appeared in, National Geographic magazine, Australian Geographic, BBC Wildlife Magazine, Aqua Geographia, and Nature Australia, among others. He has authored and photographed two children's books: African Safari, a journey through African ecosystems, and Desert Journal, based on evolution and adaptations to life in the desert.
In 2004 Edwards was awarded the inaugural Pursuit of Excellence Award by the Australian Geographic Society "for his extreme efforts and absolute commitment to obtaining rare and amazing photographs."

Carolyn Drake is an award-winning documentary photographer. Her work has been supported through grants from the Fulbright Scholar Program and National Geographic and honored by UNICEF, the National Press Photographers Association, and the Society of News Design. She was chosen as one of Photo District News' 30 emerging photographers to watch in 2006 and as one of the Magenta Foundation's emerging photographers in 2007.
Drake graduated with honors from Brown University in 1994 with a degree in American studies and media/culture. She studied photography at the International Center of Photography from 2001-2002 and subsequently pursued a master's degree in visual communication at Ohio University. Prior to becoming a photographer, she worked in New York City as a producer, interactive designer, and writer for award-winning multimedia projects.
Her clients include the Nature Conservancy, National Geographic, Gourmet, Newsweek, the New York Times, and GEO, among others. Her work for National Geographic magazine includes a story on Orthodox Judaism in New York City (February 2006) and the kosher community of Postville, Iowa (June 2005).

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