Mary Calvert

Before beginning her freelance career, Mary F. Calvert worked as a staff photographer for eleven years on the award-winning staff of The Washington Times. While the bulk of her daily assignments focused on covering Congress, political campaigns and The White House, Mary’s true photographic calling was, and continues to be, documenting the humanitarian struggle of women around the world. She was a finalist in 2007 for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Photography for documenting the societal stigma of sub-Sahara women afflicted with obstetric fistula after childbirth.

In 2008, Mary was honored with the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award in International Photography for her project, “Lost Daughters: Sex Selection in India”, chronicling the social and economic motivations for the widely prevalent practice of Indian doctors performing abortions of female fetuses.

Also in 2008, she was awarded the White House News Photographers Association Project Grant to document sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The resulting project being named as a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Photography for “ …courageous work published in The Washington Times that vividly documents how rapes, by the tens of thousands, have become a weapon of war in Congo”.

Calvert believes that journalists have a duty to shine a light into the deepest recesses of the human experience and provide a mirror for society to examine itself. Exploring the plight of women and children worldwide as they struggle to secure for themselves the most basic human rights while enduring the effects of armed conflict is a subject that must be illuminated with conviction and consistency. She a true believer that the light cast by her labor is capable of affecting meaningful social change.

In addition to being a guest faculty member of Momenta Workshops, the Western Kentucky University Mountain Workshops, the NPPA’s Flying Short Course, and the Eddie Adams Workshop, she has been a member of the faculty for the Department of Defense Worldwide Military Photographers Workshop in Ft. Meade for the last fifteen years.

A select list of Mary’s clients include The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, AOL, The New York Post, Inside Counsel Magazine, McClatchy-Tribune Photo Service, The International Herald Tribune, and Medicine + Health Magazine for The George Washington University Medical Center. She has been published all over the globe including Le Monde, De Groene Amsterdammer, iDNES, inmediaONE, Mother Jones, and The Christian Science Monitor.