Les Stone (born in New York City, New York, May 18, 1959) is an American photojournalist. He has received several World Press Photo and Picture of the Year awards for his work spanning from 1989 to the present.
Biography
editIn the 1980's in Hampshire College he pursued a degree in photography. In 1984 he graduated from Hampshire College with a BA in Photography.
After graduation, Stone returned to New York City and worked in corporate and fashion photography. In 1987 he was hired as an assistant to the MTA photographer on Madison Avenue. Soon Stone became the head photographer. For 4 years Stone worked at the MTA, photographing the underground transit system.
In 1987 Stone traveled to Port-au-Prince, Haiti to photograph a demonstration and witnessed about 50 men, women and children killed. He also became the object of the violence and his car was shot by bullets.
On May 10, 1989 he photographed the bloody assault of the Vice President-elect of Panama Guillermo Ford by members of the Batallon Dignidad, a paramilitary group employed by Generalissimo Manuel Noriega. He and Ron Haviv were the only American photographers to capture the attack on camera. After the publicity of Stone's photographs, he was called by Sygma to work with them for the next 11 years. With Sygma, he traveled extensively throughout the world, covering wars in Ethiopia, Afghanistan and Kurdistan.
Stone's photographs have appeared in the National Geographic, Time, Life, Paris Match, Stern, Fortune, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, Mother Jones, Panorama, GEO, US News and World Report, as well in [1], [2].
Stone has chronicled conflict in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Kosovo, Liberia, Cambodia and Haiti, among other war zones, and traveled over 80 times to Haiti to cover Vodou ceremonies, and has produced a feature story on the Cholera epidemic in Haiti. He has also done photo essays on the life of yanomamis in the Amazon, Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and coal mining communities in the U.S.
Recent Work
editStone received a grant to photograph health care problems in West Virginia (Appalachia). He has worked for NGOs, and done photo essays of coffee growing in Guatemala and Nicaragua, as well as education in Nicaragua. He traveled to Rwanda to cover a story on education. The most recent work was documentation of hydrofracturing or "fracking" in Bradford County, Pennsylvania for Greenpeace, and the impact of Hurricane Sandy in New Jersey for the American Red Cross.