(Photograph: Dina Rose)

David Freese Photography
www.davidfreesephoto.net

West Coast: Bering to Baja
www.bering2baja.net

David Freese was born in Mineola, New York, in 1946 and was raised in Garden City, New York. After graduating from the University of Rochester, he taught photography in the United States Army Signal Corps in 1969 and 1970. He then worked for more than thirty years as a freelance assignment photographer shooting corporate/industrial and editorial photography on location. During that time, he also worked as an assignment/contract photographer for Zuma Press in San Clemente, California, and for Gamma Liaison in New York City. Freese now teaches in the Film and Media Arts Department at Temple University and also directs the photography program at Burlington County College, where the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development presented him with its Excellence Award for outstanding contributions to teaching, leadership, and learning. Freese has completed several bodies of thematic fine-art work in various genres, including portraiture, landscape, documentary, and street photography. His photographs have been exhibited widely and are in the collections of the Haggerty Museum of Art, the Polaroid Collection, Library of Congress, Denver Art Museum, Center for the Study of Place, and Allentown Art Museum to name a few. His photographs have appeared in Communication Arts, pdn (Photo District News), Photo Insider, Polaroid International, Popular Photography, Smithsonian Air and Space, and View Camera magazines. Freese has received both a Fellowship in the Visual Arts and a Special Opportunity Stipend from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts as well as a Polaroid Artist Support Grant. He is a member of the Society for Photographic Education and a member and former President of the Philadelphia Chapter of the American Society of Media Photographers.

ABOUT THE ESSAYISTS

Naomi Rosenblum was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1925, and moved to New York in 1933. She received her Ph.D. in American art history in 1978 from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and today is an esteemed photographic historian, writer, curator, and art critic. She has been on the Acquisitions Committee of the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography, a Scholar-in-Residence in the Photography Department at the J. Paul Getty Museum, and a member of the Board of Advisors for the Paul Strand Committee of the Aperture Foundation. She is the author of five landmark books, including A World History of Photography, originally published in 1984 by Abbeville Press and now in its fourth edition, and A History of Women Photographers, originally published in 1996 by Abbeville Press and now in its third edition. She has also written numerous articles on contemporary American, Canadian, and European photographers as well as various movements in photographic history. In 1998, Naomi and her husband, noted photographer and teacher Walter Rosenblum, were awarded the Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievement by the International Center for Photography in New York City. Her Website is www.rosenblumphoto.com.

Simon Winchester was born in North London, England, in 1944, and was raised there. After receiving an undergraduate degree in geology from Oxford University in 1963, he worked as a field geologist in Africa for a Canadian mining company before switching careers in 1967 and becoming a journalist for The Guardian and a frequent commentator on, and contributor to, BBC radio. Over the years Winchester has written for Smithsonian, National Geographic, and Conde Nast Traveler magazines, and he is the author of more than twenty best-selling books, including The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (Harper Perennial, 1999), The Map that Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology (Harper Perennial, 2001), Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded (Harper Perennial, 2003), A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 (Harper Perennial, 2005), and Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories (Harper Perennial, 2010). In 2006, Winchester was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II for "services to journalism and literature." His Website is www.simonwinchester.com.