Carlos Javier Ortiz was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico and raised in Chicago, Illinois. As a teenager, his love of photography led him to work at a traveling carnival to save money for photography equipment and college tuition. He studied photojournalism at Columbia College Chicago and became a staff photographer for Chicago In The Year 2000 (CITY 2000), a yearlong project documenting the city and its inhabitants. Since that time, Carlos Javier has focused on documenting society's most vulnerable communities across the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, Israel and West Bank. As a result of his commitment to addressing social problems, Carlos Javier won the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights Photography(2009) award for Too Young To Die, his multiyear, comprehensive examination of youth violence in the United States and Central America. He was also a finalist for the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography (2008). In 2010 Carlos accepted an invitation to become a contributing photographer for “Facing Change: Documenting America,” a non-profit collective of some of the nation’s best photographers and writers covering under-reported aspects of America’s most urgent issues. He has taught graduate photojournalism at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism and has been a guest lecturer at numerous other colleges and universities. In 2011, Carlos Javier received the Open Society Institute Audience Engagement Grant for his continuing work on Too Young To Die. Carlos Javier has also received the California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowship for his coverage of youth violence as a public health issue (2012). Other grants and awards include the Driehaus Journalism Fund for Government Accountability and Investigative Reporting (2011) and the Annie E. Casey Foundation Medal for Meritorious Journalism for his collaboration with WBEZ-FM/Chicago Public Radio on Chicago's high school dropout rate (2010). His work is currently in collection at the Museum of Contemporary photography in Chicago. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world, including Migrant Workers: Leica Gallery Fotokina, Cologne, Germany, CITY 2000 Traveling Group Exhibition: French-American Center for Art, Paris, France , International Photography Festival, Aleppo, Syria , American Cultural Center, Alexandria, Egypt , De Melkweg, Amsterdam, Sao Paulo, Brazil and American Poverty:
We All We Got by Carlos Javier Ortiz explores the consequences and devastation of youth violence in contemporary America between 2006 and 2013. Through a mix of powerful photographs, incisive essays and moving letters from diverse individuals affected by this scourge, Ortiz’s timely body of work brings home the true cost our country’s epidemic of gun violence.
Carlos Javier Ortiz’s work provides an avenue for knowing the children and their families whose lives are shattered by bullets. We All We Got is not the end of the conversation about youth violence and society’s complicity, but rather the beginning. The terror in the eyes of grieving children and inconsolable mothers allows the viewer to begin understanding the toll of this violence on the children who live within it.
© Carl...