25.8.-30.9.2001

Joseph Rodriguez has been working as a photojournalist and documentary photographer for 16 years. His work has appeared in New York Times Magazine, LIFE, Time, Newsweek, Village Voice, Vibe, National Geographic and numerous other international publications. Rodriguez`s photos have been exhibited widely in various museums and galleries in the USA, Mexico, France, Holland, Denmark and Sweden, among others.

Joseph Rodrigues was born in 1951 and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He ran away from home at the age of 17, lived in the streets of New York and wound up in prison on Riker´s Island. After the prison Rodriguez decided to change his life. He got interested in photography and later graduated from the International Center of Photography with a diploma in photojournalism and documentary photography. As his first project he started to document the life of New York´s Spanish Harlem. He knew the neighborhood from his teenage years, when his uncle lived and owned a candy store in there. Spanish Harlem is known as a community which suffers from the problems of crime, drug abuse, AIDS and poverty. Rodriguez photographed the life of this community for four years and also managed to bring out the more humane face of the Spanish Harlem. In 1990 National Geographic published Joseph Rodriguez´s feature "Growing up in East Harlem" as its cover story and he also made the book Spanish Harlem (Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1995).

in people´s minds. Rodriguez´s own juvenile years on the streets of New York helped him to approach this topic and gain gang kids´ trust. As a result of this project he made the book EAST SIDE STORIES Gang Life in East LA (Powerhouse Books, 1998). Rodriguez´s

gang photos were also published in Carmilla Floyd´s Swedish book Respekt - Ett reportage från gängens & våldets Los Angeles (Bokfärlaget DN, 1998).

During the 1990s Joseph Rodriguez photographed "Prostitutes in Mexico, " "Street Kids in Mozambique," Romania´s Ailing Institutions," "Tortured Kurds in Turkey," among other topics. Many of his photographs were used by Medecins sans Frontieres, the Red

Cross and Amnesty International. At the moment Joseph Rodriguez is following the youth parolees and ex-offenders in Silicon Valley. He is doing this project in cooperation with PixelPress and Human Rights Watch.