USA, b. 1962.

Born in Appalachia in 1962, William Jordan began his career in photography as a news photographer for his hometown newspaper, The Ironton Tribune, in 1976. He became a student member of the National Press Photographers Association in 1977 and began submitting images to the Associated Press. He maintained a robust stringer relationship with the Gannett owned, Huntington Herald-Dispatch throughout high school. He studied photojournalism/biomedical photography at Ohio University, School of Visual Communication under Charles Scott, who arranged for Jordan to be the first undergraduate photography intern at the award winning Troy Daily News. After completing two consecutive internships he returned to OU in Athens, and enrolled in an additional area of studies examining the social/political realities of Sub Saharan Africa via the Center for International Studies in the School of Arts and Sciences. In 1986 he became the first medical photography intern at Johns-Hopkins University Medical School Biomedical photography Dept. in Baltimore, MD. He served two terms before accepting a staff photographer position with the Biomedical Media Center at University of Massachusetts Medical Center, Worcester, MA in 1985. While medical/scientific photography sustained Jordan during this period, he maintained his photojournalistic and self initiated documentary efforts through freelance assignments and stock image sales.

Jordan transitioned to freelance medical/scientific photography late in 1986 following marriage to Paula Baldoni. He provided photography services to clinicians and researchers throughout the Harvard Medical School teaching hospital network. Baldoni completed the MDIV program at Harvard while the couple worked jointly, and individually, with a variety programs serving marginalized populations in Metropolitan Boston. Their work included direct care services, advocacy, and concurrent photography projects involving homeless men and women, state and private mental health patients, multiple handicapped children and adults, youth participants in a land trust /reclamation project in the heart of economically depressed Roxbury, MA, and The Institute for Community Economics which developed a revolving loan fund to address the problems of lower-income communities with limited access to land, housing, and capital.

Consistent with his earliest photographic efforts Jordan continues to draw from personal experience and observations to produce images, which explore the human experience: from early portraits of “hobo’s” on the banks of the Ohio River, to current projects which include an examination of violence, risk, and survival of street level prostitutes in the Midwest; photographic essays on the plight of landmine survivors; and an effort to visually describe the current level of social, political and economic isolation of people with disabilities worldwide.

Jordan continues to accept assignments from editorial and corporate and non-profit organizations as well as commissions from private individuals for a variety of photographic projects.