Thomas Dworzak was born in Kötzting, Germany. He had already decided to become a photographer from an early age, travelling to Northern Ireland, Israel, Palestine and to Yugoslavia while still in high school.
Dworzak lived in Tbilisi, Georgia from 1993 until 1998 during which time he photographed the conflicts in Chechnya, Karabakh and Abkhazia, documenting the impact of years of brutal war and exploring the interplay between Russian literature and representations of the Caucasus. The work was published as the book Kavkaz.
A few months after the start of the war in Afghanistan in 2001, on assignment for The New Yorker, Dworzak travelled to Kandahar where he came upon a collection of retouched studio portraits of Taliban soldiers which he used to create the book Taliban, published in 2003.
For the decade following the September 11th attacks, Dworzak covered the ensuing wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, as well as their international political ramifications. While embedded with Iraqi medical evacuation teams, he documented their day-to-day operations which he later published as M*A*S*H* I*R*A*Q*, a book in which he juxtaposes his original photographs with screenshots of the TV series M*A*S*H.
Dworzak reported on the crisis in Haiti, the Tsunami aftermath in Sri Lanka and conflicts in Chad, Nigeria, CAR, and Ethiopia, in addition to the “coloured revolutions” of Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan.
In the Caucasus, he covered the Second Chechen war and the Georgian “Rose Revolution”, as well as the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia and Kadyrov’s Chechnya. He remained there after the war, photographing for the Magnum group project Georgian Spring, the travel journal of ten Magnum photographers who visited Georgia in 2009.
Besides his personal project in the Caucasus in 2011, Dworzak covered the war in Libya and the aftermath of the Egyptian revolution and, in 2012, the protest in Russia and the situation in the North Caucasus leading up to the 2014 Sochi Olympics, published in 2014 as Beyond Sochi, a limited-edition box set of maps.
Thomas Dworzak’s work has been widely published in the international press, by magazines including The New Yorker, TIME (where he was a contract photographer from 2005-2008) and National Geographic. His work has been exhibited at art institutions including the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne; the Leica Gallery, Frankfurt; La Maison Doisneau, Paris; and the Goethe-Institut, New York.
Dworzak became a Magnum nominee in 2000 and has been a full member since 2004.