Robert Pledge (1942, England)
Robert Pledge is one of the truly great communicators within photography and possesses an enormous knowledge of photographic art and history. He is considered as a leading light and pioneer of photo journalism,
He was born in 1942 in London, UK and moved to Paris, France at the age of ten. A student of West African languages and anthropology, he found his way into journalism as a specialist in African affairs. In 1970 he became an editor at the French visual arts magazine Zoom, le magazine de l’image, and in 1973 the director of the New York office of the picture agency Gamma. In 1976 he and David Burnett founded Contact Press Images in New York, which has become a highly regarded independent photographic agency very much in the spirit of the early Magnum. For over three decades Contact Press Images has promoted and distributed the work of some of the finest award-winning photojournalists and documentarians in the world. Today, with offices in New York and Paris, it represents a select group of talented men and women from more than a dozen nations.
Pledge has curated major exhibitions worldwide and served on prestigious international juries including that of the World Press Photo Foundation, three times. A visiting professor at several Chinese universities, he is also a member and former president of the Board of Trustees of the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund in the USA. In 2004 and 2010 he received the Overseas Press Club of America’s “Olivier Rebbot Award” for Best Reporting in Books, respectively for Red-Color News Soldier, A Chinese Photographer’s Odyssey Through The Cultural Revolution (Phaidon) co-authored with Li Zhensheng, and 44 Days—Iran and the Remaking of the World (Focal Point), co-authored with Burnett and writer Jacques Menasche.
At the Nordic Light festival in Kristiansund he will exhibit photographs from Contact Press Images, a collection of work from different regions of the world and covering a variety of issues.
Be sure not to miss his presentation “1961-2001: From the Berlin Wall to the Twin Towers – History and Photojournalism — parallel developments”.
”Robert can give lectures for days on end without repeating himself – and I personally would not miss a single one of them.” (Morten Krogvold, Artistic Director, Nordic Light)
