Mon, Apr 14, 2014</p>
<p>Stanford graduate wins Pulitzer for photography
San Francisco native Josh Haner recognized in Weekly photo contest in 2002</p>
<p>by Elena Kadvany / Palo Alto Weekly</p>
<p>Josh Haner, staff photographer and senior editor for photo technology at the The New York Times, has won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography for his images of the recovery of a Boston Marathon bombing survivor. Haner is a Stanford University graduate who grew up in San Francisco.</p>
<p>Haner, 34, went to Stanford to study studio art with an emphasis in photography and symbolic systems with an emphasis on human-computer interactions.</p>
<p>In 2002, he was one of 15 students awarded the Robert M. Golden Medal for Excellence in Humanities and Creative Arts – a prestigious Stanford award given to graduating seniors for a research project in the arts – for a documentary project he made on generational differences in a Southern Kenyan Maasai village.</p>
<p>He told the Weekly about his experiences in Kenya. Armed with a 35mm Nikon and six grants from five Stanford departments, Haner traveled to Loodoariak, a village in southern Kenya. Over the course of three months, alternating between living in a dung-walled hut and a tent, he shot more than 6,000 photographs.</p>
<p>The same year, a photo he submitted to the Weekly’s 11th annual Photo Contest won third place in the “Peninsula People” category. The black-and-white photo is of a man, named Warren, sitting in his house.</p>
<p>“Pictures are necessarily about two people: the person taking the picture and the person whose image is being taken,” he told the Weekly in 2002. “There’s a tendency for photographers to want only their own names under their photos, but I think it’s terrible when the subject is forgotten, because it gives the impression that you don’t spend enough time with them.”</p>
<p>The photo was taken with a 3200 speed film, medium format, and developed at the photography laboratory at Stanford University</p>
<p>“In the majority of the community surrounding Stanford, success is often defined by having a fence, a house, and not knowing your neighbors,” he said in 2002. “I hope people who have to find success in terms of sheltering themselves off from the community around them will get to see that there are ways of life that are just as rich or richer.”</p>
<p>At age 10, San Francisco-native Haner took a free course at the Harvey Milk Photography Center in San Francisco, which he said sparked a dream of one day becoming a National Geographic photographer.</p>
<p>“I’m going to be a starving artist when I graduate,” he told the Weekly in 2002. “It’s where my heart lies.”