Jon Lowenstein

Early life

Lowenstein was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to a Jewish family. His mother, Alice Lowenstein, is a writer, and his father, Edward Lowenstein, is a retired medical doctor. He grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts. Lowenstein has two older brothers, Jeff and Michael Lowenstein. He attended the University of Iowa where, while studying English language, he had aspirations to become a photographer, which led to taking classes at a local camera shop. The owner of the shop recognized his passion and volunteered to mentor him.

Photography

Lowenstein has spent the past decade engaging his adopted community on Chicago’s South Side through photography.

During this time, Lowenstein has also traveled, studied, and documented the experiences of undocumented Latin Americans living throughout the United States. Shadow Lives USA follows the migrant trail from Central America, through Mexico and throughout the United States in an effort to tell the real stories of the men and women who make up the largest transnational migration in world history. This project, unique in its breadth and intimate scope, forces the viewer to engage with the impact of America’s punitive immigration and economic policies on some of the United States’ most vulnerable populations.

His international assignments have included covering elections in Afghanistan, the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and social violence in Guatemala. He completed a project about the impact of inhaled nitric oxide on cerebral Malaria in Ugandan Children. He has also worked in countries like Brazil, El Salvador, South Africa, Mexico, and Germany.

Lowenstein is partnering with the Trans-Border Institute, part of the Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies at the University of San Diego, to provide local faith leaders and religious youth groups in Escondido, California with tools to mediate escalating tensions between new migrant and native-born communities. For this project, "Escondido en Escondido", Lowenstein will run a photography workshop with religious leaders and local youth using images from his book, Shadow Lives USA, as a way to spur dialogue around the immigrant experience and talk about the dangers of border crossings, living undocumented in the United States, and deportation, among other issues. Participants will then interview and photograph one another and the resulting work will be published in newspaper format, to be distributed by those involved to the rest of their larger communities.

Awards, honors, and films

Lowenstein was awarded the 2012 Open Society Foundation’s Audience Engagement Grant and was named a 2011 Guggenheim fellow in photography for his work on the South Side, Chicago. He is also a 2011 TED Global Fellow. and was named a 2012 Hasselblad Master. In 2008, he was named the Joseph P. Albright Fellow by the Alicia Patterson Foundation and also won a 2007 Getty Images Grants for Editorial Photography, a 2007 World Press Award, and was named as a USC Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism Racial Justice Fellowship. He won the 2005 NPPA New America Award, a 2004 World Press photo prize, 2003 Nikon Sabbatical Grant, the 58th National Press Photographers Pictures of the Year Magazine Photographer of the Year Award, and Fuji Community Awareness Award.