Thomas Dworzak

Life and work

Dworzak lived in Tbilisi, Georgia from 1993 until 1998 where he documented the conflicts in Chechnya, Karabakh and Abkhazia. Whilst there he worked on a project about the Caucasus region and its people, the impact years of brutal war had on the region, and the interplay between Russian literature and the typical imagery of the Caucasus. This was published as the book Kavkaz.

A few months after the start of the war in Afghanistan, in 2001, Dworzak travelled to Kandahar with Jon Lee Anderson on an assignment for The New Yorker. Whilst there he found and bought a collection of retouched portrait photographs of Taliban soldiers from photo studios, which he used for the book Taliban. The pictures show a campy esthetics, close to the gay movement in California or a Peter Greenaway film.

For the decade after the September 11 attacks Dworzak covered the ensuing wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, and its impact on US politics. He produced the work for his book M*A*S*M*A*S*H* Iraq, examining the daily lives of medivac teams in Iraq, whilst embedded with them. The book includes screenshots of the TV series M*A*S*H overlaid with subtitles.

Dworzak became a Magnum Photos nominee in 2000 and a member in 2004.

Publications by Dworzak

Publications with others

Awards