Ron Tarver is a Pulitzer Prize–winning photojournalist who explores the African American experience through photography. He credits the Philadelphia art dealer Sande Webster for launching his career, explaining, “If it hadn’t been for Sande, I don’t know what kind of career I would have had in the art world.…Sande is white but she made a commitment to show Black artists’ work at a time when I know I couldn’t have gotten into any other galleries in town.”[1] Tarver was born in Fort Gibson, Oklahoma, and lives in the Elkins Park suburb of Philadelphia. He graduated from Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, with a BA in journalism and graphic arts in 1979, attended Missouri Photographic Workshop in Forsythe in 1984, and earned an MFA from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia in 2017. He served as the staff photographer at the Muskogee Phoenix in Muskogee, Oklahoma (1978–80), and the Springfield News and Leader in Springfield, Missouri (1980–83). He worked as a photojournalist at the Philadelphia Inquirer for thirty-two years (1983–2014) and won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for a series documenting school violence in the Philadelphia public school system.
Tarver was influenced by Dox Thrash, recounting, “I remember the very first time I saw one of his etchings, and I just got lost in it. I get a shiver just thinking about it. I wondered how I could do that with photography.”[2] He was the founder and director of PhotoSession, an annual photography conference (1996–99), and Photo-Ops Workshops (2011– present), both based in Philadelphia. He taught photography at Drury College (now Drury University) in Springfield, Missouri (1982–83), Perkins Center for the Arts in Moorestown, New Jersey (1999–2000), and the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial in Philadelphia (2000–4). Tarver was a trustee at the Philly Art Center from 2014 to 2020 and a workshop leader and lecturer at the Princeton Photography Club in New Jersey from 2012 to 2013. He has been a visiting assistant professor of studio art specializing in photography at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, since 2008, and he was a visiting professor at the Experience Liberal Arts College program in Shanghai in 2017.
PMA Collection
Notes
[1] Tarver, quoted in Valerio 2015, 34.
[2] Tarver, quoted in Valerio 2015, 43.
References
The Print Center. n.d. “Ron Tarver, Finalist.” Accessed March 1, 2022. http://printcenter.org/94th/tarver/.
Tarver, Ron. n.d. Artist’s website. Accessed March 1, 2022. https://www.rontarverphotographs.net/untitled.
Valerio, William R. 2015. “A Conversation with Helen M. Shannon, Ron Tarver, A. M. Weaver, and Jean Woodley.” In We Speak: Black Artists in Philadelphia, 1920s–1970s. Exh. cat. Philadelphia: Woodmere Art Museum.
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