Barbara Davidson

Barbara Davidson has built her career turning a compassionate eye towards individuals striving for dignity and normalcy. She mastered her story-telling approach through multiple assignments over two decades across 55 countries covering war, humanitarian crises and the human condition for the Los Angeles Times, the Dallas Morning News and the Washington Times.

Davidson is a three-time Pulitzer and Emmy-award winning photojournalist best known for her work on victims of gang violence in Los Angeles. A staff photographer at the Los Angeles Times until 2017, Barbara spent much of the past decade photographing women and children trapped in a culture of poverty and violence. She won global recognition for her 2011 project “Caught in the Crossfire” — an intimate story of innocent victims trapped in Los Angeles’ deadly gang wars — for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography. Davidson also produced and directed a 30-minute documentary, Caught in the Crossfire: Victims of Gang Violence, which received the 2011 Emmy Award for New Approaches to News and Documentary Programming.

In her decade at the Los Angeles Times, she also covered the San Bernardino terrorist attack which earned a staff Pulitzer Prize, in 2016, for Spot News. In 2014, she was awarded Pictures of The Year International’s award for Newspaper Photographer of the Year, for the second time, in part for her project on solitary confinement at Corcoran’s men’s prison in California. Early in her career, Barbara traveled with the Red Cross to cover the end of the Bosnian War. Her work since then has taken her to the second Intifada in Israel as well as wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. She has also covered natural disasters, including Hurricane Katrina as a member of a team that won a Pulitzer in Spot News Photography in 2006 for the Dallas Morning News and more recently covered Hurricane Harvey for the New York Times.

Since leaving the L.A. Times, Davidson has served as lead creative and director of Volvo’s SC60 Moments, an innovative campaign which used the car’s safety camera system to create a photo exhibition. Photographs from the campaign were curated in an exhibition which premiered in London and traveled to Moscow, Italy, Sweden, the United States, and Japan.

Davidson received a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from Concordia University in her hometown of Montreal, Canada, in Photography and Film Studies. You can follow her travels on IG and Twitter.