Ryan Anson is a freelance photojournalist based in Oakland, CA. Although originally from the US, Anson grew up in Kenya where he first picked up a camera and began taking pictures of people and animals. Since 1998, Anson has worked in 20 African, Asian, and Central American countries. A recipient of several journalism grants and fellowships, including the International Reporting Project (2005) and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting (2007,2008), Anson has published stories in a variety of magazines and newspapers such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, Newsweek, TIME – Asia, Smithsonian Magazine, and the San Francisco Chronicle. He is a frequent contributing photographer for the wire services Bloomberg News and Agence France-Presse and has collaborated with the Aurora Photos and Redux Pictures on a number of stories. Anson is currently developing a multimedia project featuring his many years of work photographing the Asia Pacific’s diverse Muslim minority community.
TribalTruth is excited to feature Ryan Anson’s project entitled On the Edge of the Crescent: Muslim Minorities in the Asia-Pacific.
On the Edge of the Crescent: Muslim Minorities in the Asia- Pacific
One month after 9-11, Anson moved to Mindanao – a war – ravaged island in the southern Philippines. He had recived a small seed grant from a Filipino cultural foundation and began to document various militant groups who have been waging Islamic insurgencies for more than three decades. His pictures explore the impact of armed conflict and humanitarian emergencies on local indigenous and Muslim people. They also feature the Islamic traditions of this part of the Philippines, a mainly Catholic country made up of 7000 islands and incredibly diverse regional cultures. In 2005, Anson expanded this project with the support from the International Reporting Project and Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and started to photograph the religious and social experiences of other Muslim minority communities in the Asia-Pacific, including the Uighurs from China’s Xinjiang Province and Thailand’s Malay people in the southern border region. By illustrating how Muslim minorities in the Asia-Pacific live, fight, worship, and work in societies filled with hardship and persecution, this project intends to shed light on an overlooked yet viable part of the Islamic world.
This project was made possible with the support from the International Reporting Project and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
To see more of Ryan Anson’s photographs and multimedia go to his website: http://www.ryananson.net
Check out Ryan’s posts on the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting Blog – on Islam in the Philippines click here, and China’s Uighurs here.
excellent work.