NEW YORK, NY (August 1, 2008) – A photograph from Afghanistan by NPPA member Chad Hunt graces the cover of this week's issue of TIME magazine.
The picture shows Sergeant Major Combs at an outpost in the Korengal Valley that was taken last fall. Hunt has made two trips to Afghanistan in the last year, the first one self-funded and self-assigned and then again in November, on assignment for Men's Journal magazine.
Hunt wrote in his Blog that while the TIME cover means a lot to him professionally, it also means a great deal to him personally. He said that he received an eMail from the soldier's mother saying that she took the Sergeant's three children to a newsstand to buy as many copies of TIME as they could. She reported the children were running up and down the store's aisles saying, "This is my daddy!"
The photographer, who bought his own body armor and paid his own way for his first tour to cover Forward Operating Base Kamdesh, has been an NPPA member since 2005. In 1996 he interned with photographer Mary Ellen Mark, and he was a student at the Eddie Adams Barnstorm Workshop in 1994.
One of the images from Hunt's self-funded trip ended up on display in the National Portrait Gallery in London, and a gallery in New York City's neighborhood Chelsea has been selling Hunt's photographs to private collectors.
More of Hunt's photographs from his tours of Afghanistan can be seen here.
