Finbarr O'Reilly

Finbarr O'Reilly
Born	1971 Swansea
Nationality	Canadian British
Known for	Author and Photographer
Awards	World Press Photo of the Year 2005

Finbarr O’Reilly (born 1971 Swansea) is a British/Canadian photographer, and the co-author with Sgt. Thomas James Brennan of Shooting Ghosts, a joint memoir by a conflict photographer and U.S. Marine whose unlikely friendship helped both heal their war-wounded bodies and souls (Viking/Penguin/Random House, August 2017). O'Reilly won the premier award of the 49th annual World Press Photo contest in 2006 as well as numerous top industry awards from Pictures of the Year International and the National Press Photographers Association. He has been a Harvard Nieman Fellow (2012-2013), a Yale World Fellow (2015) an Ochberg Fellow at Columbia University's Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma (2014), a MacDowell Colony Fellow (2016), and a writer in residence at the Carey Institute for Global Good (2016).

Life

O’Reilly was born in Swansea in South Wales and raised in Dublin, Ireland until he moved with his family to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada at the age of nine.

He was later a Toronto-based arts correspondent for The Globe and Mail and then spent three years writing pop culture and entertainment pieces for the National Post. He joined Reuters as a freelance correspondent based in Kinshasa, Congo in 2001 before moving to Kigali, Rwanda, where he became the Reuters Africa Great Lakes correspondent from 2003-2005. He turned to photography in 2005 and became the Reuters Chief Photographer for West and Central Africa, based in Dakar, Senegal from 2005 until 2012, when he took a sabbatical year off to study psychology as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. Upon returning to Reuters, he was posted to Tel Aviv in as a Senior Photographer for Israel and the Palestinian Territories. He covered the 2014 Gaza War from inside the Strip before leaving Reuters in 2015 to write Shooting Ghosts with Thomas James Brennan, a U.S. Marine who he had met during one of his assignments to Afghanistan.

Work

He is one of several prominent journalists featured in Under Fire: The Psychological Cost of Covering War, a documentary short-listed for a 2012 Academy Award. The film won a 2013 Peabody Award

As a 2013 Nieman Fellow at Harvard, O'Reilly spent an academic year researching psychology with a focus on conflict-induced trauma. He is also a 2014 Ochberg Fellow at the DART center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism in New York.

The international jury of the World Press Photo contest selected a color image of O'Reilly of Reuters as the World Press Photo of the Year 2005. The picture shows the emaciated fingers of a one-year-old child pressed against the lips of his mother at an emergency feeding clinic in Niger.

In 2003 he co-produced The Ghosts of Lomako, a documentary about conservation in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In the same year he co-directed the documentary, The Digital Divide about technology in the developing world.

External links

• Finbarr O'Reilly's Website
• Shooting Ghosts book web site www.shootingghosts.com
• "Finbarr O'Reilly", The New York Times
• "Fighting photographic cliches: Finbarr O'Reilly and gold in the Congo", The Telegraph
• "Finbarr O'Reilley", The Daily Post