Lucian Perkins is a staff photographer for The Washington Post. He
graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in biology
and worked on the student newspaper, The Daily Texan. While there, he
studied under photographer Garry Winogrand. In 1979, Perkins received an
internship at The Washington Post. Later that year he was hired full
time, based partially on a photo story about the first women admitted to
the U.S. Naval Academy that won the National Headliners award and was
published in major magazines and newspapers throughout the world.
In 1994, he received "Newspaper Photographer of the Year" by the National Press Photographers Association for a portfolio that included projects in Russia and a
"Behind-the-Scenes" look at the New York fashion shows. In 1995, Perkins and Post reporter Leon Dash were awarded a Pulitzer Prize for their four-year study on the effects of
poverty on three generations of a Washington, D.C. family through the
eyes of the family's matriarch, Rosa Lee Cunningham. Perkins has
covered many major global events including Russia since 1988, the war in Bosnia, the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and the Gulf War. In 1996, Perkins won World Press Photo of the Year for a photograph he
took of a young boy peering out the back window of a bus leaving a
war-torn area of Chechnya.
Over the last five years, Perkins has been working with Russian
photographers to organize exhibitions and exchange programs between
Russia and the U.S. In the spring of 1995, he founded and helped organize,
along with Bill Swersey, InterFoto '95, the first ever International
Photojournalism Conference in Moscow. This event is now a highly
successful annual festival. An exhibition of Russian photography he
organized entitled "Russia: Chronicles of Change" traveled to the U.S. in
1996 and 1997. At present, he is working on InterFoto '99. Perkins'
first book, "Runway Madness," (Chronicle) is an inside and often humorous look at the Fall 1998 New York fashion shows. An exhibition of the show is currently traveling throughout the United States.
