Marissa Roth

Marissa Roth is a freelance documentary photographer and photojournalist who lives in California and whose work is seen internationally in major news publications. Roth was part of The Los Angeles Times photography staff that won a Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography^[1][2] for coverage of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots and was nominated for Outstanding Achievement in Documentary Photography at the Lucie Awards in 2003.^[3] She has published three books to-date, and a fourth will be on her 28-year project One Person Crying: Women and War.

Biography

Roth was born in Los Angeles in 1957. Her parents left Europe in the late 1930s, her father being from Novi Sad, then in Yugoslavia, and her mother originally from Budapest in Hungary.^[4] She graduated from the University of California in 1979 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. She apprenticed with Lou Stoumen, documentary photographer, Academy Award-winning filmmaker and UCLA professor, and worked on assignment for several magazines and newspapers including the International Herald Tribune, Time, Newsweek, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and Asiaweek. Roth has also taught at UCLA, as well as the Julia Dean Photo Workshops. Since 1984 her photographs have been exhibited in, and collected by, multiple institutions.

Roth was married to designer and artist Nigel Waymouth for one year after a five-year-long relationship.

Career

Roth’s assignments have included hard-news stories in Los Angeles - gang shootings, fires and earthquakes,^[5] and the 1992 riots; the 1989 Philippine coup attempt; and the first post-communist elections in Hungary.^[6] Among the human interest stories Roth has covered are Kosovar-Albanian refugees in Albania;^[7] Afghan refugees in Pakistan; the homeless in Japan; victims of the Union Carbide gas leak in Bhopal, India; and survivors of the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines.^[8]

Roth’s current focus is the culmination of 28-year-long multi-country project that addresses the impact of war on women in their particular society, country or culture. The subjects of One Person Crying: Women and War include Afghan refugee women, Kosovar-Albanian women, American mothers who lost sons in the Iraq War, Catholic and Protestant women in Northern Ireland and Eastern European World War II survivors. The text is written by Roth and recounts her family history as it relates to The Holocaust, and her odyssey as a photographer working on the project. Roth traveled to Vietnam in early 2012 to complete the series.^[9] In 2011 Creative Visions Foundation became a fiscal agent for One Person Crying: Women and War enabling contributions to aid in developing a book and traveling exhibition.

Selected projects

• In 2000 Roth completed a project for the Los Angeles Public Library ^[10] which contains 72 images that were exhibited at the Library in 2000, and which the LAPL published in the book Real City: Downtown Los Angeles Inside/Out.^[11]
• In 2005, Roth received a commission from the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles to photograph all of the Holocaust survivors affiliated with the Museum. Witness to Truth is a portfolio of 70 portraits of, and interviews with, the Holocaust survivors who volunteer at the Simon Wiesenthal Center. It was printed by Roth, and is on permanent exhibition.^[12][13]
• In 2010, the Museum of Tolerance hosted the exhibition Srebrenica: Then is Now. 15 Years After the Massacre drawn from Roth’s two trips to Bosnia and Herzegovina.^[14]
• In 2010, Roth was commissioned by the Starlight Foundation to create photo essays about seriously ill children who are supported by the Foundation. The essays were published in the organization’s annual report.^[15]
• In early 2012, Creative Visions Foundation held an exhibition of One Person Crying: Women and War at Dan Eldon Gallery for Emerging Artists^[16][17]
• In August 2012 the Museum of Tolerance launched an 88-print exhibition of One Person Crying: Women and War^[18]

Books

• Infinite Light: A Photographic Representation of Tibet, published by Marquand Books, 2014. Foreword by Dalai Lama.
• Burning Heart, A Portrait of the Philippines, published by Rizzoli in 1999. Text by Jessica Hagedorn.
• Real City, Downtown Los Angeles Inside/Out published by Angel City Press in 2001. Text by D. J. Waldie.
• Come The Morning published by Wayne State University Press in 2005. Text by Mark Jonathan Harris.

References