Description: D'Amato's portraits give individual faces to the ongoing crisis in African-American communities like Chicago's West Side
Brief description: Paul D'Amato grew up in Boston during the height of racial unrest, civil rights protest, and bussing. He moved to Oregon to attend Reed College and claims to have learned as much from traveling cross-country four times a year--often by hitch-hiking and hopping freight trains--as he did in class. After receiving an MFA from Yale, he moved to Chicago, where he continues to photograph until this day. He has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pollock- Krasner Grant, and a Rockefeller Foundation Grant to Bellagio, Italy. His work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Art Institute of Chicago, among many others. Paul is a professor at Columbia College, Chicago.