Jack V. Picone (born 1958) is an Australian documentary photographer, photojournalist, author, festival/collective founder, tutor and academic. He specialises in social-documentary photography.
Picone's coverage of war zones and social issues is internationally prominent, and over a career spanning more than three decades, his photojournalism has encompassed 10 conflicts across three continents, the global HIV/AIDS pandemic and the Nuba peoples of Sudan, Africa, among many other subjects.
His work has been featured in a wide range of international publications including Time, Newsweek, The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), The Age, Liberation, Der Spiegel, L'Express, Granta, Independent (UK) and The Observer. As of 2016, Picone's work is held at various venues including the Australian War Memorial, State Library of NSW and National Portrait Gallery of Australia, and his exhibited work has been displayed at numerous international venues, including the Australian Centre of Photography, University of Berkeley, United Nations headquarters and Visa Pour L'Image Perpignan. Picone has also authored/coauthored seven books.
Among his list of honours, Picone is a three-time winner of the Picture of the Year International (POYi) award; a winner of the UNESCO Humanity Photo award, the Mother Jones/IFDP Grant for Social Documentary Photography award and the World Press Photo award; and a finalist of both the Walkley Awards and the Amnesty International Media Awards.
Picone received both his Master of Visual Arts (MVA) and PhD from Griffith University, Queensland, Australia, and he was an "Artist-in-Residence" visiting professor of Lingnan University in Hong Kong from 2012 to 2014. As of the beginning of 2017, he is a lecturer at Mahidol University in Thailand.
Early life and education Born in Moree, New South Wales (NSW), Australia, in 1958, Picone grew up in rural Australia, and is of an Italian Australian and English Australian background, a period that was later self-described as a "privileged middle-class background". Picone's grandfather served with the Australian military in Papua New Guinea during World War II, and this would later influence the direction of his photographic career.
During his early childhood, Picone was intermittently cared for by an Australian-Aboriginal nanny who he knew as "Ilene"; in 2016, Picone recounted the times when Ilene would be driven back to the local mission where she lived: "I vividly recall at the end of each working week my father putting Ilene and me in his big 1966 Chevrolet car and driving us out of town … We drove 'down the track' to drop Ilene back to the 'mission' (Aboriginal settlement) to be reunited with her family and friends."
Between 1971 and 1977, Picone completed his high-school certificate at Waverley College in Sydney, Australia. His master's studies at Griffith University commenced much later in 2002, lasting until 2006, and he eventually received his PhD in documentary photography from the same institution in 2014.
Work In her 2007 book Photography and Australia, Helen Ennis writes that Picone is among a group of photographers and photojournalists who emerged during the postmodernism of the post-1980s era, when documentary photography "unexpectedly resurfaced". Ennis explains that documentary photography and photojournalism had become divided during the 1970s due to ideology, but this gap was lessened in the 1990s due to factors such as the introduction of glossy weekend magazines, which presented photographic essays on contemporary life. Ennis includes Picone as one of the "social documentary" photographers alongside Stephen Dupont and David Dare Parker.
Picone's first professional role was that of a staff photographer at the prominent Australian daily newspaper, SMH, as well as its weekend glossy magazine, Good Weekend, which is a position he began in 1987. Around the same time, Simon O'Dwyer and Trent Parke were gaining experience, also as staff photographers, at The Age and The Australian, respectively. In 2015, however, Picone revealed that the SMH job became "repetitive and unchallenging", leading him to enthusiastically indicate his interest in the role of Gulf War photojournalist in 1991 when the opening was announced by one of the SMH photo editors.
War/conflict Picone explained to the VICE publication in 2013 that, in contrast with the stereotypical "adrenaline junkie" and voyeur perceptions of war correspondents, he was actually seeking to challenge himself to see if he could remain headstrong under such arduous conditions after having considered the prospect for a number of years: "I wanted … to see if I would be able to keep my head—literally and metaphorically." Picone would later explain that the role of the war photographer is to provide a voice for the "invisible" and the disempowered.
The "final catalyst", in Picone's words, was the Laurie Lee book As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, a fictional account of a young man who leaves his home in Cotswolds, England, UK, in 1943 and eventually finds himself in the Spanish Civil War. Picone explained in 2013 that Lee "really captured the atmosphere of the Spain he saw, coloured by his young man idealism."
After his acceptance of the Gulf War assignment, Picone was sent to Baghdad, Iraq, but his introduction to war photojournalism was brief, as he was soon arrested by the Iraqi secret police for having transmitted photographs of Iraqi troops entering Kuwait, and this was followed by his deportation to Jordan. Also in 1991, Picone managed to clandestinely enter Gaza with the assistance of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), because he "didn't want to be officially attached to the Israeli Army". But again, he was deported, this time by Israeli authorities, after he was caught photographing the death of a young Palestinian.
Picone was subsequently sent to cover the First Nagorno-Karabakh War in Armenia, which he has called his "first 'real' war experience". Arriving in Armenia in 1992, aged 30 years, Picone has described the trench warfare of the conflict as akin to that of the First World War. During one mountain-side attack that led to shrapnel injuries, Picone recalls experiencing an "affirming, edifying euphoria that comes with escaping death".
Following Armenia, Picone not only relocated to London, UK, but his war work also changed continents as he commenced his coverage of his first-ever conflict in Africa, which was to lead to further work in the region. In 1992, he entered the war zone of the Somali Civil War during a famine, and this was followed by his time in Angola from 1993 to 1995, which was also dealing with a civil war. In Angola, Picone spent time in the city of Quito, where he experienced an "ominous" silence and was struck by how "war weary" the women and children appeared. Picone's Angolan work also includes images of the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) soldiers, sick children, and ex-soldiers who had been chained to mechanical parts in mental hospitals. Picone wrote of Angola in 2015: "No matter how many times I photographed scenes of poverty and desperation … I never failed to be confronted by the pathos of it."
Following the publication of his Angolan images throughout Europe, Picone was subject to public criticism regarding a set of images wherein a young civilian Angolan male is beaten and shot by MPLA soldiers for refusing the compulsory-conscription campaign of the MPLA. Picone, who was accused of voyeurism, later recalled that he was unsure if the man eventually died, but asserted that he was helpless to prevent the incident, and risked being shot by the soldiers if he attempted to intervene.
In 1994, Picone spanned two continents, covering the Bosnian War in the former Yugoslavia and the "100 Days of Slaughter" in Rwanda, Africa. In Bosnia, Picone captured images of Bosnian Muslim fighters engaged in trench warfare and children during the Siege of Sarajevo; he described the children of the conflict as typically stressed, aggressive and erratic. The photographer's Rwandan experience was described in 2016 as a "dark journey into a country rapidly descending into a vision of hell." In his recounting, Picone's focus is the rural town of Rukara, where "nobody was spared"—the parish church was the scene of many devastated corpses, and mounds of dead bodies were piled up in the nearby woods. Since his return to London that year, Picone affirmed in 2016 that "the nightmare of Rwanda has never left me."
The First Liberian Civil War was the subject of Picone's correspondence in 1996, but it was not until 2001 that he returned to another conflict zone. After returning to Australia in 1998, where he founded the Sydney branch of the now-defunct Network Photographers agency, Picone was accompanied by a fellow Australian photographer to the Thai/Myanmar-border town of Mae Sai, where fighting had broken out between the Shan State Army and the Burmese Army.
Picone's war photography was then featured in the 2002 "Beyond the Facade: Twentyone Years of Photojournalism From Network Photographers" exhibition that commemorated the 21st anniversary of the Network agency, which had been founded in London by young photographers looking to publish "politically concerned pictures". Over the course of the agency's lifespan, Picone contributed to the forming of its reputation as a source of "hard-hitting" photojournalism.
Picone was based in Bangkok at the time of the 2010 Thai political protests that were organised by the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship ("Red Shirts"), and his detailed account of two army snipers, who he was physically alongside while they were engaged in conflict, was published in SMH. His coverage produced the photographic essay "Battle for Bangkok", for which Picone became a finalist at the 2010 Walkley Awards.
HIV/AIDS After the launch of the Positive Lives project in 1993, a HIV/AIDS photographic collaboration between the Terrence Higgins Trust and Concern Worldwide, Picone volunteered as a contributor over a nine-year period. The volunteer-led project sought to use photography to address the stigma and prejudices surrounding the virus, and reached over two million people during a 15-year period.
Although Picone's documentation was varied, comprising a Thai monastery hospice, a Thai children's home for orphans living with the virus, the Hong Kong/China border where sex workers and truck drivers had become unwitting viral transmitters, and Australian HIV-positive activists, it was his work with Andrew Knox that became the most prominent. Knox had contracted the virus at the age of 14 years through a blood transfusion and subsequently invited Picone to document his life story until he died in 1999. Knox was diagnosed with Aids Dementia Complex (ADC), which made it impossible for him to live at home. In addition to memory loss, seizures and violent mood swings, he was hospitalised frequently with pneumonia.
In accordance with Knox's invitation, Picone remained with Knox until his last living moment, when he was surrounded by his family. Picone's body of Positive Lives work regarding Knox then formed a central component of the 2004 "experimental piece" The Scent of Positive Lives: (Re)Memorializing Our Loved Ones by Angela Kelly, then a doctoral student with La Trobe University's Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, and Aaron Kerner, then a lecturer at San Francisco State University. Kelly wrote in the article, which was published in the academic journal Qualitative Inquiry: