Ryan Spencer Reed

Ryan Spencer Reed (born 1979) is an American social documentary photographer. He has worked in Central and East Africa in the capacity of a photojournalist, covering the Sudanese Diaspora, since 2002.^[1] After returning from covering the War in Darfur in summer 2004, he and his work have moved around North America to universities in the form of traveling exhibitions and lectures. The Open Society Institute & Soros Foundation awarded him with the Documentary Photography Project's Distribution Grant in 2006.^[2][3]

While exhibiting and speaking internationally on the subject of Sudan, Reed has photographed extensively on the hubris of power amidst the twilight of the U.S. industrial revolution, which is touring in exhibition form. Since Spring of 2012, Reed took on a long-term project on the modern incarnation of the Band of Brothers: 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne through training and a deployment to Afghanistan.^[4] This work was unveiled in its entirety at the Grand Rapids Art Museum in the Fall of 2014. The work aims to catalyze a dialogue on the dissonance between the myths and realities of war.^[5]