Born in 1972 and growing up in the small town of Cham in the Bavarian Forest, Thomas Dworzak very early on decided to become a photographer.
Still, in high school, he travelled to Northern Ireland, Israel/Palestine, and the disintegrating Yugoslavia.
Immediately after graduating, he left Germany, always combining his travels and attempts to become a photographer with studying languages. Spanish in Avila, Czech in Prague, and Russian in Moscow.
In 1993 he discovered the Caucasus, its conflicts (Chechnya, Karabakh, Abkhazia), people and culture and decided to live in Tbilisi until 1998. In 2010 his early work was published as “Kavkaz”, combining pictures with excerpts of classic 19th-century Russian literature (Tolstoy, Pushkin, Lermontov).
Affiliated with the Paris photographic agency Wostok Press, he began to cover news, the Kosovo crisis in 1999 and returned to Chechnya. His dramatic pictures of the ‘Fall of Grozny’ in 2000 were widely published and received several awards.
Dworzak became a Magnum nominee in 2000 and a full member in 2004.
In the years following the 9/11 attacks, he spent time covering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as their impact on the US. During a several-month assignment in Afghanistan for The New Yorker, he discovered studio portraits of the Taliban; these images would form his first book, “Taliban”. The images that were taken during his many assignments in Iraq, most of which were shot for TIME Magazine became his next book: “M*A*S*H* IRAQ”.
From 2005 to 2008, as a TIME Magazine contract photographer, Dworzak covered many major international news stories including Macedonia, Pakistan, Chechnya, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Lebanon, Haiti, Chad, C.A.R., the London Attacks, Ethiopia, Iran, US presidential campaigns, Hurricane Katrina, and the revolutions in the former Soviet republics of Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine.
In 2006, Thomas photographed the New York Marathon while participating himself.
Since the early 2000s, he has been documenting Tehran’s 17.9 km long Valiasr Avenue.
Thomas remained in Georgia after the 2008 war with Russia. This would lead to the Magnum Group project Georgian Spring, which was a starting point for a new, several-year-long engagement with the “New Georgia” under President M. Saakashvili. He spent 2009-2010 in Afghanistan, documenting the deployment of ISAF troops and their return home.
A National Geographic assignment on the Sochi Olympics later became the book “Beyond Sochi”, 2014.
In 2013, a commission for the Bruges Museum led him to photograph the memory of WWI. This became a several-year-long project concerning the legacy of the First World War in about 80 countries around the world which was finished in November 2018, 100 years after the end of the conflict as a “Feldpost” box of 1568 postcards with texts written by Chris Bird.
Since 2011 he is represented by °CLAIRbyKahn.
Always an avid collector, Thomas started gathering Instagram screenshots of a variety of subjects and has been grouping them into ever-growing collections of Instagram artist scrapbooks. A final set of 20 of these books has been presented at the International Center of Photography, ICP, in New York since February 2017. (Read an ICP interview here).
Besides his personal stories, Thomas Dworzak continues to cover international stories, such as the DMZ in Korea, Cuba, Colombia, China, and Liberia, the Arab Spring in Egypt, the war in Libya and most recently, the November 2015 Paris terror attacks, Pokemon Go! and the 2016 US and the run-up to the 2017 French Presidential elections.
When covering the 2015 refugee crisis, he conceived “Europe – a photographic guide for refugees,” which was produced and distributed free of charge to migrants.
From June 2017 until 2020, Thomas Dworzak served as President of Magnum.
In the summer and autumn of 2017, Thomas, together with writer Julius Strauss, travelled in the footsteps of John Steinbeck and Robert Capa’s 1947 “A Russian Journal”.
His current long-time project, “War Games,” was interrupted at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic when he began exploring and photographing almost exclusively the new virtual “Zoom” world.
Thomas’s 2003-2018 documentation of Georgian troops in the “War on Terror” was published in 2021 as a feature-film screenplay – photo book “Khidi – The Bridge” with Ineke Smits and Jeroen Stout.
A BNF Bibliothèque Nationale de France grant allowed him to continue his “War Games” project in France in 2022.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he has been exploring the “New Iron Curtain” from northern Norway to eastern Kazakhstan.
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.