From his iconic street portraits to his final roll of Kodachrome, globetrotting photojournalist McCurry is a master at finding personal connections with his subjects

Street portraits are one of McCurry's specialties. Most photojournalists tend to be somewhat removed from their subjects, but McCurry has perfected the intimate, close-up portrait in documentary photography.

His most famous portrait is the iconic "Afghan Girl," the now-ubiquitous image taken in 1984 during the Soviet occupation, showing an Afghan child with penetrating, pale eyes. In this portrait, we see the girl face to face....

Through new distribution platforms, multimedia formats and teamwork, today's photojournalists are trying to resurrect a moribund industry.

BREAKING NEWS — Photojournalism, the use of images to tell stories and convey information about topical events, from the Crimean War to this year's health-care reform debate, has died following a long and gradual illness.

The profession was approximately 150 years old...

Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Rick Loomis always remembers to put people first when telling his visual stories.

"I might die.”

That was the thought running through the head of Rick Loomis, photojournalist with The Los Angeles Times, while he was embedded with a company of U.S. Marines during the pivotal Battle of Fallujah in Iraq on April 26, 2004.

The day started out as a search for insurgents, but it quickly became a fight for their lives as scores of armed militiamen massed around them, nearly surrounding the house they were in. The insurgents used everything at their disposal to level the building and kill the Marines – machine guns, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. Loomis had never been in a more dangerous...

A Napa Valley photojournalist points out the world's inequalities through his lens.

Photojournalist Peter Menzel is passionate about what he views as the sorry state of American life, from "red-state" politics and war to junk food-based diets.

But he doesn't just gripe about it. He's successfully published five photography-based books, including "Material World: A Global Family Portrait" and "Hungry Planet: What the World Eats," to raise awareness of these issues...

For much of the last century, photojournalists have enjoyed a host of options for disseminating their images to the world. After World War II, several cooperative news agencies, such as Magnum Photos and Black Star, thrived and competed to promote the idea of presenting news through multi-layered photo stories.

As the millennium drew near, however, the number of agency choices shrank dramatically as a series of mergers and acquisitions whittled the photojournalism industry down to a handful of major players. Although the big three — the Associated Press (AP), Reuters and Agence France-Presse (AFP) — still dominated the world of global news-gathering cooperatives, Internet giants Corbis and Getty Images gained a stranglehold on the stock and news photography businesses by gobbling up vast photo collections.

Then a few small independent agencies, run by former photographers and photo editors, began to make an appearance on the grid of global news networks. One of the first was ZUMA Press, founded in 1995 by Scott Mc Kiernan in Laguna Beach, Calif., which recently relocated to larger offices in the nearby seaside town of Dana Point. Six years later in Manhattan, J.P. Pappis opened Polaris Images and Seamus Conlan launched World Picture Network (WPN).

All three approach the wire..

A collection of searing images from photographers who came to New Orleans and the Mississippi coast from across the country to document the catastrophe and recovery of the stricken region.

They thought that they had dodged a bullet. As the winds died down on Monday, Aug. 29, the thousands of remaining New Orleanians who had weathered the storm in their homes and in shelters learned that the eye wall of Hurricane Katrina, one of the strongest storms ever to hit the United States, had shifted slightly east. While Katrina destroyed most properties on the Mississippi coast, New Orleans, at first, looked battered but safe...

In newsrooms across the country and at photo agencies, photojournalists have taken to digital cameras like teens to cell phones.

The digital revolution has changed the face of photography and photojournalism, allowing unprecedented speed in delivering photos and, many say, superior quality.

Last January, at Super Bowl XXXVII in San Diego, Sports Illustrated went 100 percent digital, declaring that the time had arrived. SI often sets the standards for photographic image quality, so the switch was considered nothing short of historic for photojournalism...

In the Middle East, photojournalists don Kevlar vests and find back doors into places that do not even have front doors, all to show the world what words alone cannot. It's a risky job.

Journalists have been kidnapped, threatened, jailed and killed. Since the beginning of the year, 22 journalists worldwide — 12 in Iraq alone — have been killed in the line of duty or murdered because of their profession, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

In March, American freelance photographer Molly Bingham was imprisoned in Baghdad, accused of spying, held for a week, then released in Jordan...