Jane Evelyn Atwood was born in New York and has been living in France since 1971. Her work reflects a deep involvement with her subjects over long periods of time. Fascinated by people and by the idea of exclusion, she has manged to penetrate worlds that most of us do not know, or choose to ignore.
She is the author of ten books: Nächtlicher Alltag on Parisian prostitutes (Mahnert-Lueg, Munich, 1980); Exterieur Nuit, on the blind (Actes Sud); Trop de Peines, Femmes en Prison (Albin Michel, 2000) and Too Much Time, Women in Prison (Phaidon, 2000), a ten-year project that remains the definitive photographic reference on female incarceration to date; Sentinelles de l’Ombre, (Le Seuil), four years on the devastation of landmines in Cambodia, Mozambique, Angola, Kosovo, and Afghanistan; A Contre Coup (with Annette Lucas), fifteen portraits of French women who have survived abuse (Xavier Barral); Haiti (Actes Sud); and Badate, the immigration phenomenon of Ukrainian women who become caregivers for Italien elderly (Silvana Editoriale, Milan). In 2010, with Jane Evelyn Atwood #125 (Actes Sud), she joined the prestigious collection of Photo Poche Monographs. In 2011, Xavier Barral re-edits her first story about Parisian prostitutes in Rue Des Lombards. A series of conversations with Jane Evelyn Atwood and Christine Delory-Momberger is published by André Frere Editions in the collection, Juste Entre Nous, in 2015.
Jane Evelyn Atwood is the recipient of many prestigious international awards, including the first W. Eugene Smith Award, 1980; a World Press Foundation Prize, Amsterdam, 1987; the Grand Prix Paris Match du Photojournalisme and the Grand Prix du Portfolio de la Société Civile des Auteurs Multimédia (SCAM), 1990; the Ernst Haas Award, 1994; the Oskar Barnack Prize, Leica Camera, 1997; and an Alfred Eisenstaedt Award, 1998. En 2005, she was given the Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters from Bard College, U.S.A. In 2012 she had her first retrospective at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, France, and at the Botanique, in Brussels, Belgium, in 2013 – 2014. In 2014 a large part of this retrospective is presented at the Imagerie in Lannion, Bretagne, France.
