Ozier Muhammad

Ozier Muhammad became fascinated with mainstream media images of the Civil Rights Movement while growing up as part of the Nation of Islam—his grandfather was Elijah Muhammad, the Nation’s leader. The images he saw spurred him to depict his community himself, and as a teenager he obtained his first camera with the help of his cousin, photographer Onikwa Bill Wallace. He earned a BA in photography from Columbia College, Chicago, and began his career as a staff photographer at Ebony magazine, and later Jet. He joined the Charlotte Observer in 1978, went on to Newsday in 1980, and has been at the New York Times since 1992. Muhammad’s work was included in the first volume of The Black Photographers Annual (1973).

His coverage of events in Africa since 1974 have been widely celebrated, including the 1977 World Festival of African Arts and Crafts (FESTAC) in Lagos, Nigeria, and Nelson Mandela’s historic 1994 presidential win in South Africa. The 1985 Newsday story “Africa, The Desperate Continent” about drought and famine earned him, Josh Friedman, and Dennis Bell a joint Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting and a Polk Award in News Photography. He was also a Knight Journalism fellow at Stanford University in 1986/87 and a Peter Jennings Fellow in 2007 at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. He lives and works in Harlem, New York.

Muhammad’s work was featured in the Art Institute’s 2018 exhibition Never a Lovely So Real: Photography and Film in Chicago, 1950–1980.