TimBerlin / NairobiT:+49 151 223 538 13F:M:+254 722 327 306
I was born in Seattle and began my working career as an Alaska fisherman at age sixteen.
I attended art school on a scholarship, and since graduating in 1989 have covered crisis and conflict worldwide.
worked in Haiti for USAID, PBS and various print outlets from 1989-1991, and obtained an exclusive interview with General Raoul Cedras, following the first coup that ousted Jean Bertrand Aristide.
In the ’90s, I worked in North and West Africa shooting stills and video, including interviews with Nelson Mandela and Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade.
In the mid-’90s I settled in Berlin, Germany, was a co-founder and Creative Director of three full-service communications agencies, and shot commercial stills and video, servicing large multinationals including Unilever.
In 2005, I spent ten months covering the Indian Ocean Tsunami response. I shot stills and video, producing over 100 hours of footage- the largest existing archive of motion picture material acquired in Aceh Province, Indonesia. Having witnessed humanitarian disaster, conflict and its attendant death before, I was truly amazed at the scale of the tsunami’s destruction. The death-toll from the tsunami was more than 250,000- the vast majority of victims in Aceh. As I followed convoys of lorries transporting the copses to mass-burial sites, I photographed the survivors and was presented with images of human perseverance I will never forget.
In 2007, I designed, and acted as Creative Director for an IPTV (interactive television) platform with Deutsche Telekom, and delivered a series of still photo and video dispatches from Kashmir.
I have produced still photography and motion pictures for a number of NGOs including CARE, World Vision and the German umbrella fund raising organization Aktion Deutschland Hilft, in Europe, Asia and Africa.
In November 2008, I traveled to Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo and began a series of dispatches on the war and humanitarian crisis there, filing for the major NGOs, Al Jazeera, BBC, The Age, Die Zeit, Stern Online and others.
I am currently working in East and Central Africa.