Born in Germany in 1972, Thomas Dworzak has documented many of the most important news stories since the 1990s. At the age of 16, he started traveling to photograph conflicts in Northern Ireland, Israel/Palestine, and the disintegrating Yugoslavia. After he left his native Germany, he combined his attempt to become a photographer with an effort to study languages: Spanish in Ávila, Czech in Prague, and Russian in Moscow. During the 1990s, Dworzak lived in Georgia, exploring the people, culture, and conflicts in the Caucasus, which resulted in the book Kavkaz in 2010.
A months-long assignment for the New Yorker in Afghanistan, where Dworzak discovered studio portraits of the Taliban, became his first book, Taliban (2003). Images taken during his many assignments in Iraq, most of which were shot for Time magazine, were used to create his next book, M*A*S*H IRAQ (2007). Since then, Dworzak has gone on to photograph the revolutions in the former Soviet republics of Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Ukraine, and to cover stories in dozens of countries. In a recent project, Feldpost (2013–18), he photographed the “memory” of the First World War in more than 80 countries, producing 1568 “postcards” (one for every day of the war). It was completed on November 11, 2018, exactly 100 years after the end of the conflict.
He was president of Magnum from 2017 to 2020.
