Madonna and Kristen Ashburn

I met Kristen Ashburn in 2002 when she guest lectured at a class I was taking at the International Center for Photography with Andre Lambertson. She had been self-financing trips to Africa to photograph the effects of poverty and HIV/AIDS in Zimbabwe in black-and-white with her Rollei, and the images were stunning.

photo by Kristen Ashburn

Since that time, she went on to win the Canon Female Photojournalist of the Year (the year after Ami Vitale won), a Getty Foundation grant, PDN 30 under 30, and multiple NPPA and World Press prizes. She produced a traveling exhibit called Bloodlines which premiered at the prestigious 401 Projects gallery in Chelsea along with a beautiful multimedia piece.

But more importantly, she kept going back to Africa — still self-financed — to continue to photograph the on-going epidemic. Somewhere along the way, Madonna found Kristen’s work, and pulled Kristen over to Malawi, and that work and her previous work are now feature prominently in Madonna’s new documentary “I am Because We Are,” which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last weekend.

Besides her humility, I’ve always found Kristen inspiring because all her long-term projects have been self-financed, and it seems like the assigned editorial work she takes for clients like Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, and Business Week are merely ways to finance the humanitarian photography that drives her. Many aspiring photojournalists that I’ve spoken to always wonder how they can get their start, and for Kristen, it was a stubborn perseverance to shoot what was important to her, irrespective of geography or political climate.

photo by Kristen Ashburn

After some gentle prodding (read: being annoying to her), Kristen has finally decided to offer some prints in a limited edition through her PhotoShelter Personal Archive account. I’ve got one sitting in my apartment and it’s haunting and gorgeous. Definitely worth a look.