Jan Grarup
| Jan Grarup | |
|---|---|
| Born | 2 December 1968 |
| Occupation | Photographer |
| Years active | 1992–present |
| Website | http://www.grarupphoto.com |
Jan Grarup (born 1968) is a Danish photojournalist who has worked both as a staff photographer and as a freelance, specializing in war and conflict photography. He has won many prizes including the World Press Photo award for his coverage of the war in Kosovo.
Grarup was born in Kvistgaard, not far from Helsingør, in the north of the Danish island of Sealand. He got his first camera when he was 13 and began to develop black and white photographs. At the age of 15 he took a photograph of a traffic accident and sent it in to the local newspaper Helsingør Dagblad where it was published. When he was 19, he spent his Easter holidays in Belfast at the time of the troubles, gaining an appetite for conflicts.
After studying journalism and photography at the Danish School of Journalism in Aarhus from 1989 to 1991, he became first a trainee, then a full-time photographer with the Danish tabloid Ekstra Bladet.
In 1991, the year he graduated, Grarup won the Danish Press Photographer of the Year award, a prize he would receive on several further occasions. In 1993, he moved to Berlin for a year, working as a freelance photographer for Danish newspapers and magazines.
During his career, Jan Grarup has covered many wars and conflicts around the world including the Gulf War, the Rwandan Genocide, the Siege of Sarajevo and the Palestinian uprising against Israel in 2000. His coverage of the conflict between Palestine and Israel gave rise to two series: The Boys of Ramallah, which also earned him the POY World Understanding Award in 2002, followed by The Boys from Hebron.
On his website, Grarup explains that his work reflects his belief "in photojournalism’s role as an instrument of witness and memory to incite change, and the necessity of telling the stories of people who are rendered powerless to tell their own".
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