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Marissa Roth: How the Photojournalist Respects A War Zone
Marissa Roth is a freelance documentary photographer and photojournalist who lives in California and whose work is seen internationally in major news publications. Roth was part of The Los Angeles Times photography staff that won a Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography for coverage of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots and was nominated for Outstanding Achievement in Documentary Photography at the Lucie Awards in 2003. She has published three books to-date, and a fourth will be on her 28-year project One Person Crying: Women and War.
Contents
Marissa Roth: How To Win A Pulitzer Prize for Photojournalism
Biography
Roth was born in Los Angeles in 1957. Her parents left Europe in the late 1930s, her father being from Novi Sad, then in Yugoslavia, and her mother originally from Budapest in Hungary. She graduated from the University of California in 1979 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. She apprenticed with Lou Stoumen, documentary photographer, Academy Award-winning filmmaker and UCLA professor, and worked on assignment for several magazines and newspapers including the International Herald Tribune, Time, Newsweek, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and Asiaweek. Roth has also taught at UCLA, as well as the Julia Dean Photo Workshops. Since 1984 her photographs have been exhibited in, and collected by, multiple institutions.
Roth was married to designer and artist Nigel Waymouth for one year after a five-year-long relationship.
Career
Roth’s assignments have included hard-news stories in Los Angeles - gang shootings, fires and earthquakes, and the 1992 riots; the 1989 Philippine coup attempt; and the first post-communist elections in Hungary. Among the human interest stories Roth has covered are Kosovar-Albanian refugees in Albania; Afghan refugees in Pakistan; the homeless in Japan; victims of the Union Carbide gas leak in Bhopal, India; and survivors of the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines.
Roth’s current focus is the culmination of 28-year-long multi-country project that addresses the impact of war on women in their particular society, country or culture. The subjects of One Person Crying: Women and War include Afghan refugee women, Kosovar-Albanian women, American mothers who lost sons in the Iraq War, Catholic and Protestant women in Northern Ireland and Eastern European World War II survivors. The text is written by Roth and recounts her family history as it relates to The Holocaust, and her odyssey as a photographer working on the project. Roth traveled to Vietnam in early 2012 to complete the series. In 2011 Creative Visions Foundation became a fiscal agent for One Person Crying: Women and War enabling contributions to aid in developing a book and traveling exhibition.