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Last September, during a break in presidential campaign coverage, The New York Times sent me to Fresno, California to work on a story by Adam Liptak about the advantages small-population states have over larger ones due to Senate representation. Liptak compares the outsized advantage Wyoming’s roughly 500,000 residents have with their two senators, over Fresno’s 500,000 residents who must share their two senators with the rest of California’s 38 million residents. I had about a day and a half to illustrate Fresno and the issues it’s struggling with. Here’s a few of my favorites…

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While in Austin two weeks ago, Education Week sent me on a rather interesting assignment: teachers training for their Concealed Handgun License in Clifton, Texas.

It’s hard for me to fathom any of my teachers carrying a concealed handgun in the classroom when I was in school. I suppose we live in a time when this is becoming a reality. The idea that gun violence has reached a high enough level in our society that school officials are seriously considering arming teachers and staff as a measure of security is quite frankly a sad sentiment. Would it work? Would the obvious dangers of having loaded handguns in classrooms day after day pay off? Kids are smart like foxes, we have to remember. After the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut following a growing string of school shootings in the past two decades in America, school district officials are forced to take a hard look at this question.

And while the district in Clifton, Texas has not yet adopted a measure to arm teachers, the fact that 78 of their teachers and staff took the Concealed Handgun Training less than two weeks ago speaks volumes to how the district is considering the option. And they certainly are not alone. Trainer Johnny Price, owner of Big Iron in Waco, Texas, said his schedule has filled with training sessions for school districts around the state after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary.

Education Week writer Nirvi Shah’s balanced and well-written piece, ‘Armed Educators in Some Schools, Debated in Others’ is well worth the read.

These and more images are available for licensing in our archive.

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A presidential inauguration is the epitome of choreographed political theater. Plenty of political theater is self-aggrandizing, but in this particular case, the theater serves a more important and humbling function, emphasizing the peaceful transition of power and respect for the democratic will of the American voter. It also serves to elevate the office of president above any individual who might hold that office.

That said, the institutions of government are comprised of people, and personalities are an inevitable part of the inaugural pomp and circumstance. The historic nature of Barack Obama’s first inauguration wasn’t quite matched by this one, but it was history all the same. The biggest frustration with trying to cover such a sprawling and tightly-secured event is that no one photographer is capable of capturing more than a sliver of the day. As photographers, our instinct is to be everywhere, see and capture everything, and at the end of the day come away with a definitive record of the event. But, with a visit to church in the morning, a series of choreographed steps at the Capitol, the swearing in, inaugural speech, luncheon, parade, and inaugural balls, there are simply too many parts to the day for one photographer to attend, due mainly to the logistics of security and high demand for access by photographers from around the world.

Brendan Hoffman and I learned this four years ago, when we were both on assignment for Getty Images. This time around, we were again part of the same team, working for the New York Times. The team mentality is maybe more of a mental shift for a freelancer – although in some ways being part of Prime has tamped down our instinctive lone wolf approach – but it can be a lot of fun to see that one of your colleagues has nailed a frame, which makes you look good too. We’re grateful to have been a part of the day and to have a front-row seat to history being made.

You can see a number of our images in this gallery on the New York Times site, and we’ve shared some other favorites below. These images are also available for licensing in our archive.

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I think Carlin Isles has something that may change the game of rugby: extreme speed. I got to meet this polite, soft spoken young lightning bolt at his home in Round Rock, Texas while on a portrait assignment for The Sunday Times (thanks to my compadre Joel Salcido for the referral). Carlin is a former professional sprinter with a personal best of 10.13 in the 100-meters and he has a hunger for contact. Put a guy with Carlin’s speed on a big rugby pitch and a mere seven guys on the opposing side and imagine the possibilities. Hence my hunch for a shift in the ways of rugby.

After only a short stint on the US Rugby team, Carlin has garnered a lot of international attention. The guy is amazing to watch and I can’t wait to see more. If we’re  lucky then his dreams of playing in the 2016 Rio Olympics (the first for rugby) will come true and we will see him scoring for the US Olympic rugby team.

Carlin was a joy to photograph and he looks super fast just standing still.

These and more images are available for licensing through the Prime archive.

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From time to time a nice surprise comes along in the way of a commission for an original photo essay. You know, the kind of 10-page essay in a glossy magazine that the previous photo generation sings ‘remember when’ anthems about, and the kind that led many of us into this world of photography. I received such a surprise in November when Austin Monthly’s photo director, Cory Rivademar, called to tell me they were starting work on the January 2013 doctors issue and wanted a photo essay in black-and-white showing a day-in-the-life of the residents at University Medical Center at Brackenridge. A commission with proper budget and time on a day-in-the-life essay of anything, and my vintage garb was feeling suitable all of a sudden.

With wordcraft by Sarah Thurmond and a fantastic play by Austin Monthly’s edit and design team, the article paces wonderfully and readers get to learn about this sought-after residency program at one of Texas’ oldest public hospitals.

Thanks to Dr. Beth Miller, Steve Taylor, and the residents at University Medical Center at Brackenridge for their hospitality and accomodation.

The January, 2013 issue of Austin Monthly is on newsstands now.

These and more images are available for licensing through the Prime archive.

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About 90% of the time assignment work for newspapers tends to be pretty cut and dry. Show up at this location and at this time. Make some portraits or document the life of John or Jane Doe. Period. Nothing more. Nothing less. Get in. Get out.

But sometimes the photo editor is looking for something more.

Something with a slant or an angle, perhaps, or something surreal, or they want Diane Arbus like freakiness. Sometimes editors just send you the article, which is their way of saying, you’re a big boy and I’m busy so you figure it out. And some times the photo editor has no idea and they direct you to the writer who also turns out to have no idea. Every once in awhile, however, along comes an assignment where you have complete freedom to shoot it as you choose. These are the moments that we as photographers live for.

A few weeks ago Becky Lebowitz, photo editor at The New York Times, called me to cover a high school football practice in Dover, New Hampshire. It sounded pretty cut and dry. Football practice starts at 3pm. They know you are coming. But it also looked like it had the potential to be one of occasional opportunities where I could shoot it freely, so I was excited. Finally a fun assignment!

I showed up, walked down to the practice field and the welcoming party was there waiting for me like a door slamming in my face. You see the story was about a controversy. A local school board member had proposed banning football at Dover High School on the grounds that the sport is no longer safe. The week before there were local tv news outfits camped out in the parking lot. Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh referred to the school board member as “pantywaists who want to try to take the risk out of everything in life.” The football coaches and the players felt like they were thrown in to a spotlight, that they didn’t want to be in and they were not too happy about it. Obviously, they weren’t too happy about my being there either.

As practice went on I started to chat more to the coaches. One coach had me labeled from the beginning. He facetiously asked me if I wanted to interview a Romney supporter. This is the state of “live free or die” and I was working for that bastion of the liberal press, The New York Times. I politely explained to the coach that I’m a freelance photographer and I’m not the reporter covering the story. At that point he relaxed and explained his version of the story. The whole story has been blown out of proportion, because the school board member was this liberal type who just wanted to attract attention to himself. It was in essence about him.

Dover had a game the next day so the practice was light, helmets only and limited contact. I moved around all over the place, got behind the lineman and did all this all without getting trampled in the process. I shot freely and had a blast.

The next day I met Dr. Paul Butler, a retired physician and the controversial school board member, to take his portrait. While walking around his home and going from location to location looking for ideal settings for the portrait, we chatted. He’s a tall man with the build of a tight end: broad shoulders and long arms. He didn’t look like a “pantywaist”. He played football in college and is a Patriots fan, so he didn’t hate the sport. He also struck me as earnest, humble and a bit embarrassed by all the attention he had received.

I asked him how he had been treated since the story broke and he said that he hadn’t had any problems in town. He had received a few hate filled emails, but he also got some very thoughtful emails from people who are genuinely concerned about the safety of football. One person wrote him and accused him of being a homosexual. Butler thought that it was funny. He referred to himself as one of these cheap old Yankee republicans. “They can call me many things, including a homosexual, but when they called me a liberal, that hurts.”

At that moment, the assignment had transformed itself in to one of those priceless moments, where I got to walk away with some valuable insight on the human condition. The coaches had misjudged Dr. Butler and they had misjudged me. In essence, they shot the messenger, not once, but twice. It’s all too common to judge the motivations of others without having all the information. It’s human nature and we do it all the time.

As photojournalists, our job is to provide visual information. We can only hope that our work speaks for itself and helps provide a starting point for a more reasonable conversation and a healthy dialogue. And if we’re really lucky, every once in awhile we can walk away having learned something as well.

Here’s a link to The New York Times article and more images can be found in the archive.

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Max Whittaker and I spent over 16 months covering the 2012 presidential campaign, racking up more miles, flights, and hotels than we’d like to calculate. Amidst the countless rallies, rope lines, and handshakes it’s easy to forget that it does just come down to the second Tuesday in November. Despite the billions spent by both campaigns and special interest groups, the voter is alone in the booth with their decision.

While Max and I covered Election Day on assignment in Nevada and D.C., our new member Pete Muller wandered down to the White House late at night to capture the scene of a nation celebrating four more years.

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As we welcome Pete Muller, the first new photographer to join Prime since our launch, we wanted to help everyone get to know him a bit better. We interviewed Pete about his work, the stories he’s tackled, and his approach to photography.

Prime: What inspires you as a photographer?

Pete Muller: My work is born of a fascination with the human condition. Before documentary work, I nurtured this curiosity with the study of history. Both formally and informally, I pursued a course of historical study that focused on marginalized communities, identity politics, and armed conflict. I spent copious hours studying identity schisms in so-called nation-states—poring over the cases of former Yugoslavia, Israel/Palestine, Chechnya, and other conflicted lands. With time, history spawned interest in anthropology, sociology, and other disciplines that offer insights into power, nationalism and conflict.

My work in photojournalism is an extension of this investigative process. I practice photography with history in mind—aiming to contribute nuanced primary documents to the emerging record. Quite often, photography is my excuse to embark on close quarter research without seeming too peculiar. The photos are my questions and assertions about the issues I cover and serve as a means to conversation about them. I am driven by a strong and sympathetic interest in underrepresented and marginalized communities. I often focus on the universal desire for dignity and believe that intimate, sensitive photos actively oppose the sterilization of suffering. I hope that my work encourages nuanced consideration of the lives of those depicted.

Prime: How did you break into photography and who were your major influences within the world of photojournalism?

PM: My mother was a news photographer throughout my upbringing so I was exposed to photography and news culture from an early age. During my mischievous adolescent years, she often enlisted me as her informal photo assistant which, generally speaking, amounted to carrying her equipment, taking down names and keeping her company as she processed film in the darkroom. During her tenure with the Lynn Daily Item, a local newspaper on Boston’s north shore, the city of Lynn was in the throes of a drug epidemic, gang wars and a staggering amount of violent crime, much of which was intimately connected with the declining socioeconomic conditions in the city at the time.

My mother was, and is, a very compassionate photographer who felt a deep connection to the issues of poverty, inequality and struggle. She felt a strong and natural connection to disenfranchised communities and her solidarity with those communities allowed her remarkable access. People trusted her- they knew that she would not exploit or embarrassment them and that their dignity would remain intact in the images she made. While I was not conscious of it at the time, I was heavily influenced by her approach.

Our apartment contained an impressive, if battered, collection of photo books. I was fascinated by a LIFE magazine photo book that depicted 20th century American culture and history. I have always been deeply interested in history, which is the subject I studied study in college. The LIFE book explained history in visual terms, a union that I found then and continue to find very compelling. There were also photo books by Robert Mapplethorpe and others whose work focused, at least in part, on rather explicit sexuality. Mapplethorpe’s work was edgy and exciting and beautiful and gave me the sense that photography was a means of documenting such a vast variety of human experiences. It could be whatever the photographer wanted it to be.

I have always been attracted to sensitivity and beauty in documentary work. This preference drew me to the work of Jehad Nga whose early chiaroscuro-style work was a major aesthetic influence. I find his work at once dark and beautiful; real and surreal. I am also influenced by Tim Hetherington and Richard Renaldi, two photographers whose work deals, in different ways, with issues of manhood and masculinity. Masculinity as social construction has long been of interest to me and will play a more central role in my work in the coming years. I have been deeply inspired by the intellectually rigorous approach employed by Peter van Agtmael whose exemplary work on America’s wars is of the utmost value to the historical record. While I have only been recently exposed to his work, I have profound admiration for Jason Eskenazi who, I believe, is one of the finest photographers working today. I also find perpetual inspiration in the work of Stephen Ferry, Alex Webb, Mary Ellen Mark, Paulo Pellegrin, Eugene Smith and Arnold Newman.

Prime: You spent three years observing South Sudan’s transition into independence. Why did you choose to cover this particular story?

PM: I moved to Sudan in 2009 knowing that the country was at a critical point in its history. It had been devastated by decades of brutal civil war between the Arab-Islamic north and largely African-Christian south and was on the cusp of formal division. I also knew that very few journalists were there covering the story. I believed that spending a few years documenting southern Sudan’s transition to independence would be of value to the historical record and might shed light on an underreported but geopolitically significant story.

It has been an exhilarating time to be in Sudan and, later, South Sudan. One has an unmistakable sense that something momentous is underway. The effort being made by the nascent southern government and its international partners is as awe-inspiring as it is daunting. They are truly building a government and all the requisite state institutions from the ground up. The international community, with America playing a leading role, is working double-time to ensure that southern Sudan’s transition to independence yields stability rather than collapse.

I’ve allowed my longstanding curiosity in nation-states to guide my photographic work in South Sudan. I’ve always been interested in notions of identity that compete with the prescribed “official” identity of respective states. The unified Sudan was torn asunder by this dynamic, with the official identity and policies of the state hinging on Arab, Islamic principles while significant segments of the population were neither. The marginalized southern population felt it imperative to create a state that more aptly reflected the identity and principles of their “nation.” While this move was warranted, I believe it opened a Pandora’s box of identity questions in the south, a land of remarkable diversity with scores of competing tribes, languages and cultures. I aimed to explore those issues.

I hope that the work from South Sudan reflects my fascination with the diversity that exists there. I hope that when appropriately paired with words, it contributes to the record of South Sudan at its long awaited birth. In an intellectual sense, I hope that it underscores the challenges of national identity and nation-states that exists in countless countries across the world and has, for centuries, been the source of immense bloodshed.

Prime: What were the challenges of telling the South Sudan story and why did you continue your coverage over three years?

PM: South Sudan is an extraordinarily difficult and complicated environment. At a logistical level, it is damn hard to get around. The country is vast, the roads are nearly non-existent and, during the lengthy rain reason, are largely impassable. This made it very difficult to respond quickly to reports of fighting, displacement and other types of breaking developments. Accessing remote areas often required coordination with the UN mission, which is a process fraught with red tape.

At a more serious level, the political landscape is treacherous and complicated and outsiders are often viewed with suspicion. I came to believe that there was one narrative for outsiders and another for Southern Sudanese. It was possible to access the latter but only after developing a significant network of connected sources and doing a formidable amount of detective work.

I remained for nearly three years because the story required it. I kept telling myself that I’d leave at certain points and those points repeatedly came and went. The more I learned, the more I realized how little I knew. These realizations would cause me to question my own assertions on the situation and compel me to dig deeper—to stay longer. I aim to make work that satisfies my own strict academic requirements and I felt achieving that in South Sudan required a significant time commitment.

Prime: The Cattle Keepers of South Sudan was a project on violence in the South’s pastoral communities. Can you talk about the images and the idea behind the portraits?

PM: Those images were made in the most remote place I have ever been. They were part of a project I was doing about violence in the South’s pastoral communities. I hired a car and translator and drove about 8 hours, mostly off road, to an isolated riverbank where a subgroup of the Dinka tribe was keeping their cattle. I chose the area because it has long been the epic center of violent cattle raiding, a major source of insecurity in South Sudan. I wanted to understand more about what life was like for these isolated populations.

I made the pictures under a moonless sky. After taking each photo, I’d show it to the person, all of whom were thrilled to see their own image. I worked for as long as my light’s battery held out.

When I finished the night session, many of the young men headed to the riverside where they shouted provocative slogans at the neighboring subtribe, whose cattle camps were a few miles away. In the morning, around 7 am, a raiding party from the neighboring tribe launched an attack on the camp where I was staying. Gunfire erupted as the Rek fighters sought to repel the raid and protect their herds from theft. I chased the group as far as I could before they disappeared across the river. Five young men were killed and several more were wounded.

It was an extraordinary experience that I reflect on regularly. Never before had I been so removed from everything I knew.

Prime: Describe the project documenting the fight against mass rape in Eastern Congo? How did you decide to visually tell their story and how did you cope with what you heard and what you witnessed?

PM: I believe that the mobile military tribunals are an important aspect of establishing the rule of law in eastern Congo. For far too long, militias and military units have been wreaking havoc throughout the east with impunity. The tribunals are the first taste of restitution that rape survivors and community members have experienced.

I believe that the portraits honor the quiet defiance I found among many rape survivors in Fizi. Despite their facial identity being concealed so dramatically, I feel that each woman’s willingness to appear in the series represents a level of resistance to the intimidation and violence they endure on a daily basis.

Once we’d established the condition of relative anonymity, dozens of rape survivors were eager to pose for portraits. They moved quietly to the center of the room and waited patiently for me to work. In many instances, I was required to use my hands to make minor adjustments to their stance and location. Their faces were already covered and, given the horrible experiences they’d so recently endured at the hands of men, I felt overwhelming pressure to guide them as delicately as possible. I moved them gently by their shoulders and spoke softly in KiSwahili, a common language in eastern Congo. I felt the weight of crimes committed by fellow men and, in those moments, felt ashamed to be part of the group.

I intend to work more on some specific aspects of the trials in the coming year.

Prime: Outside of your work in South Sudan and the Eastern Congo, you have a body of work on Machine Gun Americana. How did you find the story and what were you hoping to portray within the images?

PM: Machine Gun Americana is an embryo. It is a series of pictures that I took at an extreme machine gun shoot in Oklahoma at the end of June. It is my first venture into gun culture—a subject I find of great interest. I am fascinated by frontier culture- notions of centralized state power and how proximity to it shape a community’s sense of safety and security-based self-reliance. I believe that this dynamic is at play, but perhaps inadequately discussed, in the American gun conversation. What’s fascinating to me is that this dynamic is universal. Certainly in South Sudan, a community’s proximity to state security mechanisms and community buy-in to the validity of the state plays a significant role in the retention of arms and so-called “gun culture.” I aim to build on this in different environments in the coming years.

Prime: You’re moving to Nairobi. What are you planning to work on while you’re there?

PM: In addition to remaining involved with regional news coverage, I am keenly interested in exploring some quieter avenues. Sexuality, gender and relationship issues have long been of interest to me and I intend to more actively explore these issues in Kenya and elsewhere. I would like to further develop the gender conversation as it relates to men. In conjunction with an NGO, I intend to expand my curiosity in gun culture in a few illustrative areas of East Africa and elsewhere. I’ve got a long list of projects that I’m eager to get started on.

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