Philip Holsinger

2025 Honoree / Impact Award

Philip Holsinger is an American photographer and writer specializing in the study of tribal behavior. His often years-long embeds in some of the world’s wildest places results in intimate analogue stories in the tradition of W. Eugene Smith and Peter Beard. He has worked in some of the world’s most volatile regions observing conflict and human peril; including the aftermath of war in Bosnia, the war on drugs in southeast Asia, and the plight of remote peoples such as Nicaragua’s Miskito Indians, once at the heart of the Iran-Contra war. For three years he called Cite Soleil, Haiti home where he lived with and studied the nationwide network of warlord gangs. He has made five extended expeditions with the nomad shepherds of Tusheti in the Republic of Georgia to study clan and tribal systems of the former Soviet satellite countries of the Caucasus region.

Holsinger’s work is primarily displayed in mixed-media, immersive exhibitions (represented by Chauvet Arts Nashville), in original books, and through private contract analysis.

He is the author of four books of photojournalism: The Hands of the Prime Minister(foreword by Sean Penn); Stories I Tell My Daughter; A Tourist of Saints (afterword by Petra Nemcova); and Unembraced; and two collections of poetry: Five Poems for My Mother and Father; Winter Fragments.