Louie Palu
Louie Palu is an award-winning documentary photographer and filmmaker whose work has been featured in publications, festivals, and exhibitions around the world. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting Grant and the 2011–12 Bernard L. Schwartz Fellowship from the New America Foundation, which supported his documentation of the effects of organized crime and drug violence in Mexico.
Palu is best known for his long-term projects that examine complex social and political issues such as human rights, conflict, and poverty. His 12-year study of hard mining communities in Canada’s North, Cage Call: Life and Death in the Hard Rock Mining Belt, won the Critical Mass Book Award in 2006 and was published as a monograph. From 2006 to 2010, he covered the war in Kandahar, Afghanistan, producing numerous short films and the feature-length documentary Kandahar Journals, released in 2015 in association with the Documentary Channel. He is currently completing a documentary film about the war in Ukraine.
Among his many honors, Palu has received a National Magazine Award, the White House News Photographers Association Eyes of History Award, an Aftermath Project Grant, and the Alexia Foundation Photography Grant for World Peace and Cultural Understanding. In 2015, he was awarded the Milton Rogovin Fellowship from the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona.
His work has been featured by major media outlets including the BBC, Al Jazeera, PBS NewsHour, The New York Times, Foreign Policy Magazine, TIME Magazine, Newsweek, The Atlantic, NPR, CBC, The Globe and Mail, and The Sunday Times Magazine.
Palu’s photographs have been exhibited at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, and Ryerson Image Centre. His work is held in numerous collections, including the Harry Ransom Center, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Library and Archives Canada, Portland Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, National Gallery of Canada, Library of the U.S. Marine Corps Archives and Special Collections Branch, the Australian War Memorial, and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.