Peter Turnley is renowned for his photography of the realities of the human condition. His photographs have been featured on the cover of Newsweek forty-three times and are published frequently in many of the world’s most prestigious publications. He has worked in over ninety countries and has witnessed most major stories of international geopolitical and historic significance in the last forty years. He has both American and French nationality,
Turnley has photographed most of the world’s conflicts, including the Gulf War of 1991, the Balkans (Bosnia), Somalia, Rwanda, South Africa, Chechnya, Haiti, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Kosovo, the 2003 war in Iraq. He has produced portraits and covered many of the modern world’s most influential people: Obama, Castro, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin, Mandela, Arafat, Schroeder, Ceausescu, Gaddafi, Chirac, Clinton, Reagan, Bush Sr., Lady Diana, and Pope Jean Paul II among others.
Since 1975 Turnley has also continually photographed the life of Paris, his adopted home. He was born in the U.S. but has lived more than half his life in Paris, where he worked as the assistant to the photographer Robert Doisneau in his early days in Paris in 1981.
Turnley has photographed extensively the life of Cuba since 1989 and has published a book Cuba: A Grace of Spirit. His photographs have been exhibited worldwide, including a major retrospective: “Moments of the Human Condition” at Cuba’s most important museum, “Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes”. Turnley was the first American artist since the Cuban Revolution to have a major retrospective exhibit at Cuba’s most important museum.
A graduate of the University of Michigan, the Sorbonne of Paris, and the Institut d’Etudes Politiques of Paris, Turnley has received honorary doctorate degrees from the New School of Social Research in New York, Ohio Wesleyan University and St. Francis College of Indiana. He received a Nieman Fellowship from Harvard for the academic year 2000–2001.
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