Ruth Fremson
A native New Yorker, Ruth Fremson never expected to go into photojournalism until her senior year of college. After studying graphic design at Syracuse University for the majority of her undergraduate career, expecting to pursue a career in the visual arts, she serendipitously took a photography course taught by legendary former Director of Photography for National Geographic, Robert Gilka, at Syracuse’s London center. In less than three weeks she was convinced that she had found a new path in life.
After Syracuse, Ruth attended the graduate program at Ohio University, landing an internship at The Washington Times during the summer of 1988. This led to her first staff position at the Washington Times where she worked from 1989 until September 1994 when she joined the staff of The Associated Press.
Ruth was first based in Charlotte, North Carolina photographing a lot of sports, but also covered the reinstatement of President Aristide in Haiti by the American armed forces and the end of the civil war in Bosnia. In 1996 she was transferred back to Washington, D.C. to cover the White House and spent the next two and a half years documenting the Clinton administration with short stints in London for Princess Diana’s funeral, the Pope’s historic visit to Cuba, and the Atlanta Olympics among other assignments.
Ruth was part of the AP’s team to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 for their coverage of the Clinton impeachment. In 1998 she was posted overseas in the AP’s Jerusalem bureau where she covered the Mideast conflict, stories in Egypt, Jordan, and the war in Kosovo. She worked there until The New York Times hired her in 2000 and brought her back to the U.S. to work at her ‘home town’ newspaper.
Since then, her assignments have ranged from the presidential campaigns of John McCain, Al Gore, and Howard Dean, the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 and its aftermath in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Salt Lake City Olympics, the war in Iraq, the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti and more trips to the middle east where she continued to cover the Palestinian-Israeli conflict until 2007. From 2005 through 2011 she made repeated trips to India, recording this changing and developing nation.
In 2012 she worked on the groundbreaking ‘Snowfall’ project which earned writer John Branch a Pulitzer prize. She spent a year documenting the life of a homeless child, Dasani, in 2013, which helped change New York City’s policy towards homeless children.
Besides being part of both teams to win the breaking news and feature photography Pulitzer prizes for The New York Times in 2002, she has earned awards from the White House News Photographers’ Association, the National Press Photographers’ Association, and the New York Press Photographers’ Association. Her work has been exhibited in several shows and can be found in numerous.
In 2015, Ruth transferred to Seattle, Washington, and now covers the Pacific Northwest along with assignments throughout the U.S. More recently she took on the challenge of occasionally writing stories that she pitched to her editors.