2008 Student Winner

2nd place

Justin is an award-winning freelance photographer based out of Philadelphia.

He was born in a small town in the woods of northern California, called Orleans. Nothing but trees and hippies sorta thing. He first got into photography at an early age, but then only took pictures of trees and other woody features. Today, Maxon is mainly interested in pursuing long-term projects that often examine the complex link between human struggle and perseverance.

Maxon discovered his passion for documentary photography while working on a project in San Francisco's Tenderloin, a neighborhood notorious for its poverty and glaring homeless epidemic. He has since worked on other projects in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina and in Vietnam. Currently, he is working on two long-term projects. One is back in the Tenderloin District, documenting the wide range of issues people living there face. The other project is in a small town outside Philadelphia, where he is exploring the importance of religious faith in overcoming community challenges from gang violence, to high levels of pollution, to a defective public school system.

His work has been published in The FADER, Newsweek, F2 Magazine, Washington Post, MSNBC, Photo District News, ESPN.com and various other publications.

He is represented for assignment by Aurora Select and will be interning with the New York Times in the summer of 2009.