Ron Tarver was born in Ft. Gibson, Oklahoma in 1957. He received a B.A. in Journalism and Graphic Arts at Northeastern Oklahoma State University. He has been on staff at the Philadelphia Inquirer 19 years earning honors form the National Society of Professional Journalists, the National Press Photographers Association/University of Missouri Pictures of the Year competition, World Press Photo Awards, and other state and regional wards.

He has received fellowships and a grant form the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts and the National Geographic Society respectively, and in 1997, he was named one of the Delaware Valley’s “50 Rising Stars in the Arts” by Seven Arts Magazine. In 2001 he was awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, one of the largest fellowships for an individual artist, carrying a $50,000 prize.

Tarver’s photographs have been exhibited both nationally and internationally and are in many corporate, private, and museum collections including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Smithsonian National Museum of American Art and the State Museum in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Corporate collections include Banana Republic, Johnson and Johnson, Hyatt and Sheraton Hotels. His photographs are inclided in the traveling exhibition andbook, Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers by Deborah Willis, and in Commited to the Image, at the Brooklyn Museum.

View Ron Tarver Collection