Healing Landscape: A Damaged World In Transition

• Prize
  Gold in Nature/Aerial, Silver in Science/Environment
• Photographer
  > Joson
• Agency / Studio
  Joson Studio
• Photo Date
  2016-2019

San Francisco Bay Wetland --Once home to an array of wildlife and plants, the San Francisco Bay Area salt ponds are now a world of blazing colors and patterns when viewed from above. Their dark past connected to the manufacture of napalm is part of the complicated story of a thriving land in transition—a healing landscape that unites many worlds as one.

Award-winning photographer joSon was born in the Philippines to a Filipino mother and an African American father. Sent to live with his mother’s family in Vietnam at age ten, he was educated in a Buddhist temple in preparation for becoming a monk. “I thought that was my calling long before I saw life through the viewfinder,” joSon recollects. “But the truth is, I have never left the monk-hood. I just left the temple.” Today joSon is a professional photographer based in San Francisco whose work is collected by an international list of clients.