Originally from North Carolina, he received a degree in English Literature at North Carolina State and conducted his graduate work in photojournalism at Ohio University. In 2001 he was awarded a fellowship at the Pew Center for International Journalism at Johns Hopkins in Washington, D.C., and he was the recipient of the 1999 U.S. Agency for International Development Photojournalism Grant for his work in Kosovo. His career in photojournalism has taken him to most of the major conflict zones of the past five years, including Kosovo, Angola, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Kashmir, the West Bank, Iraq, and Liberia. He lives in New York City.