Paolo Pellegrin worked for the French agency 'Vu' and the Italian 'Grazia Neri'. In 2001 he became a Magnum nominee, and in 2003 was accepted as an associate. His first major awards came in 1995, when he was awarded the first prize in the 'Daily Life' category at the World Press Photos for his work on Aids in Uganda. The following year the same work won the Kodak Young Photographer Award-Visa D'Or in Perpignan, qualified him for the World Press Photo Master Class, and won a Euro/Fuji Award. In 1997 his first book 'Children', shot in Uganda, Romania and Bosnia was published and he received the first prize at the International Photo festival in Gijon for the work from Bosnia. Collaboration with the international medical charity, 'Medecins sans Frontieres' led to his book 'Cambogia' in 1999.

He won a third prize in the portraits category and the first for 'people in the news' at the World Press Photos in 1999 and 2000 respectively and has been successful in winning various other major awards including the Leica Medal of Excellence (2001) and an Honorable Mention for the Robert Capa Gold Medal Award (2002). His pictures of Arafat's funeral won the 2nd prize for stories in the 2004 World Press Photo. Other books by him include Kukes (1999), L'au dela est la (2000) and Kosovo, The Flight of Reason (2002.) Along with works from the Kosovo and Cambogia books, you can see several other features of his on the Magnum website. Light features very strongly in Pellegrin's work (see 'Elsewhere on the Web' links), with a great deal of use of silhouetted and near-silhouetted figures, both in his colour and black and white work. He also makes use of techniques such as deliberate misframing, blurring and tilted views to give a feeling of emergency and immediacy to his pictures. Often large areas of the image are black or nearly so, with the photographer clearly seeking scenes with both low and highly uneven light. The most successful of his works are the square-format images in the book Cambogia, where perhaps the format fits better with the approach. Some of his other work - such as the large portfolio on the New York Olympus Fashion week seems to be a little repetitive, but perhaps this reflects the subject matter. This later work was shot using the digital Olympus E1 camera.

Paolo Pellegrin took part in Detour New York 2007