Stephen Katz ’92, staff photographer of The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va., has received numerous accolades for his work. Most notably, he was named Newspaper Photographer of the Year by Pictures of the Year International (POYi) during the 2008 judging session.

“POYi is arguably the highest award a newspaper photographer can win,” says Katz. Unlike the Pulitzer, for which contestants submit one photograph, POYi looks at a year’s worth of work through 40 images per contestant. This year, according to Katz, POYi received approximately 46,000 photographs from around the world.

Having also garnered honors as the 2007 Photographer of the Year from the national Southern Short Course in News Photography and as the 2008 Photographer of the Year by the Northern Short Course in Photojournalism, Katz’s platform for educating viewers about global-health issues continues to get stronger.

Katz’s POYi submission covered diverse subjects including his hometown community in Norfolk, the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings, soldiers in Iraq, a high-school prom and his work in Africa with Physicians for Peace.

Katz was in the Dominican Republic when he heard about the award.

“It meant a lot more to me since I was down there shooting the kind of work that won the honor,” he says. “To be around the people I was advocating for, it really made me more enthusiastic about what I was doing because it meant that these peoples’ voices got a little louder.”

Katz’s approach to photojournalism is nontraditional and stems from his time at Dickinson.
“I have no education in photojournalism, and I never imagined pursuing it,” he says. “As a student doing anthropology research, I found photography to be a great tool for documenting.” He considers himself an anthropologist with a camera, rather than a photographer.

“I’ve traveled to 40 countries for work and shot everything you can possibly imagine—including bigger stories like the Iraq war and Katrina,” Katz says, but his passion is covering little-known health issues.

“It’s shocking to go to facilities like mental-health hospitals in the Dominican Republic and Nigeria and to see human beings chained to beds, lying in their own feces, wasting away because they have a mental disease,” he says. He also has covered burn victims of tainted kerosene in Nigeria and documented the need for prosthetics donations in the Third World.

To continue bringing attention to these issues, Katz is working with a colleague to create a marketing business for global-health and cultural nonprofit companies.

“It’s called We’yo, which is Creole for ‘look at them,’ ” he says. “The idea is to do documentary-style photo projects focused on health issues overseas” to help nonprofits get their messages across.

Learn more about Mr. Katz and see some of his photographs:

Hamptonroads.com

Popphoto.com

Poy.org

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