Sara Naomi Lewkowicz is an 42 year old American photographer best known for her 2013 ''

Time Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to ...

'' magazine article "Photographer as Witness: A Portrait of Domestic Violence". Her work with the article and Lewkowicz's overall work covering

domestic violence Domestic violence (also known as domestic abuse or family violence) is violence or other abuse that occurs in a domestic setting, such as in a marriage or cohabitation. ''Domestic violence'' is often used as a synonym for ''intimate partner ...

won her the Ville de Perpignan Rémi Ochlik Award in 2013.

Education

Lewkowicz attended

Ohio University Ohio University is a Public university, public research university in Athens, Ohio. The first university chartered by an Act of Congress and the first to be chartered in Ohio, the university was chartered in 1787 by the Congress of the Confeder ...

, where she completed a master's degree in Visual Communication.

Photographer as Witness

On February 27, 2013, Lewkowicz published "Photographer as Witness", which had originally been published on the photography website fotovisura as “Maggie and Shane”. The article showed photographs of Shane, a 31-year-old ex-convict abusing his 19-year-old girlfriend Maggie, and was accompanied by an essay by Lewkowicz. In the essay Lewkowicz described how her initial purpose for photographing the couple was to "paint a portrait of the

catch-22 ''Catch-22'' is a satirical war novel by American author Joseph Heller. He began writing it in 1953; the novel was first published in 1961. Often cited as one of the most significant novels of the twentieth century, it uses a distinctive non-chr ...

of being a released ex-convict: even though they are physically free, the metaphorical prison of stigma doesn’t allow them to truly escape." However, during one of her visits Shane and Maggie began fighting over a woman that had flirted with Shane at a bar they had just left. Once they returned home and entered the house's kitchen, the two continued to fight and Shane escalated the dispute and attacked Maggie in view of her daughter Memphis, who had heard the altercation. Lewkowicz photographed the events, pausing at one point to ensure that the police had been called. Shane was arrested for his actions and Maggie has since left Shane. After the photos were published in ''Time'' Lewkowicz began receiving criticism from Internet users, who questioned why she continued to photograph while the physical violence was still ongoing. Lewkowicz responded to the criticism by stating "The incident raised a number of ethical questions. I’ve been castigated by a number of anonymous internet commenters who have said that I should have somehow physically intervened between the two. Their criticism counters what actual law enforcement officers have told me — that physically intervening would have likely only made the situation worse, endangering me, and further endangering Maggie." The photographs have since won several awards, including the 2014 L'Iris d'Or Award.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Lewkowicz, Sara Naomi Living people Year of birth missing (living people) 21st-century American women photographers 21st-century American photographers Ohio University alumni