Frank Fournier (born 1948) is a French

photographer A photographer (the Greek language, Greek φῶς (''phos''), meaning "light", and γραφή (''graphê''), meaning "drawing, writing", together meaning "drawing with light") is a person who makes photographs. Duties and types of photographe ...

. Before becoming a photographer, he studied medicine like his father, who was a surgeon. He moved to

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

and became a staff photographer at Contact Press Images in 1982 after joining the office staff in 1977. He is best known for his coverage of the 1985

Armero tragedy The Armero tragedy ( es, Tragedia de Armero, links=no ) occurred following the eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz stratovolcano in Tolima, Colombia, on November 13, 1985. The volcano's eruption after 69 years of dormancy caught nearby towns unawar ...

Colombia Colombia (, ; ), officially the Republic of Colombia, is a country in South America with insular regions in North America—near Nicaragua's Caribbean coast—as well as in the Pacific Ocean. The Colombian mainland is bordered by the Car ...

; the

Nevado del Ruiz The Nevado del Ruiz (), also known as La Mesa de Herveo ( en, Mesa of Herveo, the name of the nearby town) is a volcano on the border of the departments of Caldas and Tolima in Colombia, about west of the capital city Bogotá. It is a strat ...

volcano A volcano is a rupture in the crust of a planetary-mass object, such as Earth, that allows hot lava, volcanic ash, and gases to escape from a magma chamber below the surface. On Earth, volcanoes are most often found where tectonic plates are ...

erupted, leading to a

mudslide A mudflow or mud flow is a form of mass wasting involving fast-moving flow of debris that has become liquified by the addition of water. Such flows can move at speeds ranging from 3 meters/minute to 5 meters/second. Mudflows contain a significa ...

that killed more than 25,000 people. His portrait of

Omayra Sánchez Omayra Sánchez Garzón (August 28, 1972 – November 16, 1985) was a Colombian girl trapped and killed by a landslide when she was 13 years old. The landslide was caused by the 1985 eruption of the volcano Nevado del Ruiz in Armero, ...

, a dying 13-year-old girl trapped under the debris of her home, won the 1985

World Press Photo World Press Photo Foundation is an independent, non-profit organization based in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Founded in 1955, the organization is known for holding an annual press photography contest. Since 2011, World Press Photo has organized a ...

award.

References

External links

Fournier's portfolio at the Contact Press Images site
{{DEFAULTSORT:Fournier, Frank 1948 births Living people French photographers