Ashley Gilbertson

In 2004 Gilbertson won the Robert Capa Gold Medal Award from the Overseas Press Club for his photographic reportage on the Battle for Fallujah.

Born in Melbourne, Australia, Gilbertson started his career at thirteen taking pictures of skateboarders. After graduating secondary school, he was mentored by Filipino photographer Emmanuel Santos, and later Masao Endo in the Japanese highlands.

While based in Australia, Gilbertson worked on socially driven photo essays including on drug addiction in Melbourne and war zones in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. In 1999 he photographed Kosovar refugees in Australia. For the next three years Gilbertson's work focused on refugee issues around the world. In 2002, Gilbertson travelled to the Kurdish enclave of northern Iraq. Shortly thereafter, President George W. Bush made a case for war in Iraq, and Gilbertson travelled back to cover the story at the beginning of 2003. His work was published widely. In 2004, The New York Times offered Gilberston and their senior writer, Dexter Filkins, an embed with the 1/8 Marines. Gilbertson continued to cover Iraq on contract for The New York Times until 2008. A photographic memoir of his time there entitled Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War was published in 2007. In March 2009, he became a member of the VII Photo Agency's VII Network, and in 2011 he became a full member. Gilbertson's book Bedrooms of the Fallen (2014) consists of panoramic black and white photographs of the bedrooms left behind by 40 U.S., Canadian, and European soldiers—the number of soldiers in a platoon.