Ron Tarver comes from a family of African American cowboys. He grew up in Fort Gibson, a small agricultural community in rural northeastern Oklahoma. His grandfather, a member of the Black Freedman of the Cherokee Tribe, was a working cowboy during the 1940s, and Tarver spent many long, hot summer days hauling hay and working on local farms and ranches, occasionally rounding up stray cows. Tarver has distinguished himself in the field of fine-art photography. HeIn 2021, he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, in Creative Arts Photography and he has been in more than thirty solo and eighty group exhibitions. His photographs are also in numerous collections, including the National Museum of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution, Oklahoma History Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, State Museum of Pennsylvania, and Studio Museum in Harlem. As a long-time staff photographer for The Philadelphia Inquirer, he shared the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for his work on a series documenting school violence in the Philadelphia public school system, was nominated for three additional Pulitzers, and was honored with awards from World Press Photos and the Sigma Delta Chi Award of the Society of Professional Journalists. Tarver is currently Associate Professor of Art at Swarthmore College. He is co-author, with journalist Yvonne Latty, of We Were There: Voices of African -American Veteran from World War II to the War in Iraq (Harper Collins, 2004), which was accompanied by a traveling exhibition that debuted at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.