Healing Landscape: A Damaged World In Transition

• Prize
  Gold in Nature/Aerial, Silver in Science/Environment
• Photographer
  > Joson
• Agency / Studio
  Joson Studio
• Photo Date
  2016-2019
• Website
  https://josonstudio.com

San Francisco Bay Wetland --Once home to an array of wildlife and plants, the San Francisco Bay Area salt ponds are now a world of blazing colors and patterns when viewed from above. Their dark past connected to the manufacture of napalm is part of the complicated story of a thriving land in transition—a healing landscape that unites many worlds as one.

• Biography
  Award-winning photographer joSon was born in the Philippines to a Filipino mother and an African American father. Sent to live with his mother’s family in Vietnam at age ten, he was educated in a Buddhist temple in preparation for becoming a monk. “I thought that was my calling long before I saw life through the viewfinder,” joSon recollects. “But the truth is, I have never left the monk-hood. I just left the temple.” Today joSon is a professional photographer based in San Francisco whose work is collected by an international list of clients.
• Awards
  His work has appeared in magazines including Scientific American, Outside, Conde Nast Traveler and Vogue. He as won awards from Photo District News (PDN), Communication Arts, and American Illustration and American Photography (AI-AP). As Sunset Magazine described joSon’s first monograph, joSon: Intimate Portraits of Nature, from Graphis Press in 2013: "Had Richard Avedon taken up gardening, he might have ended up with photos like this.”