Photography by Amy Toensing

Photojournalist Amy Toensing has been on assignment for national and international publications including National Geographic Magazine, The New York Times, Newsweek, Time Magazine and The Boston Globe.

Toensing began her career in photojournalism in 1994, covering the community in which she grew up for her hometown paper, The Valley News in New Hampshire. She went on to work for The New York Times in Washington DC covering Capitol Hill and the White House during the Clinton administration. In 1998 Amy went back to school to earn her masters degree in visual communication at Ohio University. Since 2000 she has been a freelance photojournalist for national and international publications and contributing regularly to National Geographic Magazine. Her assignments have taken her around the globe to Asia, the South Pacific, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East.

Amy Toensing has completed eleven feature stories for National Geographic Magazine. These stories have primarily been intimate essays reflecting the lives of ordinary people. In Puerto Rico she portrayed the diverse cultural heritage of an island influenced by outside rule for over 500 years. She photographed the way of life on the remote island of Monhegan, a winter lobstering and artist community twelve miles off the Maine coast. A photograph from this story won second place in the International Pictures of the Year competition, portrait division. In addition, She has documented the Jersey Shore, the parks of Paris and the Kingdom of Tonga for NG Magazine. Toensing has also looked at social issues through her lens, including a personal project on the impact of welfare reform through the life of a single mother and her three children struggling to get by. An image from this story won an award of excellence from the Pictures of the Year competition. One of Toensing’s images was named National Geographic Magazine’s Top 10 Photographs for 2009.

Amy Toensing has worked for private organizations to photograph events in her documentary style. The Rainbow Push Coalition hired her to cover Reverend Jesse Jackson’s campaign for economic stability throughout Appalachia and Mississippi. Toensing also covered Jackson on his trip to Belgrade, Yugoslavia, which resulted in the release of the POWs from Milosevic’s military.

In 2003 Toensing was named the Photographic Alumni Fellow at the SALT Center for Documentary Field Studies in Portland, Maine where she continued a long-term project on Muslim teenage girls living in western culture. Recently, she photographed a story on the drought in the Murray-Darling Basin of Australia for National Geographic Magazine. She is based in the Hudson Valley of New York.