Andrew Quilty left school after completing Year 10 in 1999, and went to study photography at TAFE, graduating in 2004. Having undertaken work experience with the Australian Financial Review, he was employed by the paper. However, his break came when TIME magazine published photographs he had taken of the Cronulla riots in late 2005. By 2006 he was staff photographer for the AFR magazine; he gained a World Press Photo Award in 2008 and joined the Australian photography collective, Oculi. He held his first solo exhibition at Barry Stern, Paddington in 2007. Since then he has travelled and photographed in the USA, Mexico, Cuba, Europe and Afghanistan; he currently divides his time between Sydney, New York City and Kabul. His photographs have been published in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Wall Street Journal, TIME Magazine, the Times (UK), Le Monde, Vanity Fair, the Guardian Weekend magazine, the Sydney Magazine, Art & Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age. In mid-October 2014 Quilty won the Photograph of the Year award in the Nikon-Walkley Awards for Excellence in Photojournalism.
