Ryan Christopher Jones
Visual anthropologist and photographer
Ryan Christopher Jones is Mexican American visual anthropologist and photographer, originally from the San Joaquin Valley and currently based in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta for dissertation fieldwork until early 2027. He is available for editorial assignments across California.
He is a regular contributor to The New York Times, ProPublica and The Washington Post, and often works on stories of labor, environment and migration across the United States and Mexico. Two of his 2021 collaborations with the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism examined the nebulous politics of water in California’s Central Valley. Other recent work also includes in-depth reporting during the Covid-19 pandemic in New York City and Boston, the overdose crisis, NYC housing crisis, and economic mobility. He has written about the ethics of photojournalism in two 2018 op-eds for The New York Times, “How Photography Exploits the Vulnerable” and “The Deja Vu of Mass Shootings.”
In 2022 he was a judge for the Pulitzer Prizes and was also awarded the American Mosaic Journalism Prize for his coverage of under-reported communities across the U.S. He is currently a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at Harvard University, where he is researching the community politics of water transfers in California. Ryan’s research in the Delta is supported by a Wenner-Gren fellowship for dissertation fieldwork.
+1 (917) 789-2386
ryan@ryanchristopherjones.com
Editorial Clients
- The New York Times
- The Atlantic
- The Washington Post
- ProPublica
- Der Spiegel
- CNN
- The Intercept
- The Wall Street Journal
- Buzzfeed
- New York Magazine/The Cut
- Newsweek
- Nowhere Magazine (words + photos)
- The Huffington Post
- Newsday