Photographer Mary F. Calvert uses photography to inform and influence societal change by concentrating on documenting social justice issues neglected by the media at large. 

In addition to her commercial work and covering politics in Washington DC, Calvert has been focusing her journalistic attention on the continually under-reported sexual abuse of women and men in the U.S. Armed Forces.

Mary is a recipient of the  2023 Leica Women Foto Project and is the 2022 W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund Fellow.

Her project on male sexual assault survivors in the armed forces was honored as a Pulitzer Prize nominated finalist in 2020 in the Feature Photography category.

This work was supported by the 2016 Getty Images Grant in Editorial Photography and the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund Fellowship and also in 2017-2018 when Calvert was named a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in Photography.

In 2013, Calvert received the Canon Female Photojournalist Award at the Visa Pour L’Image, International Festival of Photojournalism in Perpignan, France, to begin work on “The Battle Within: Sexual Assault in America’s Military.” 

In 2014, she was the recipient of the Alexia Foundation Women’s Initiative Grant for the next chapter in the project “Missing in Action: Homeless Women Veterans.” 

The resulting work was featured in a solo exhibition at the 2014 Visa Pour L’Image and was presented in evening projections at the same festival in 2016. In 2018, the work was featured in a solo exhibition at the Festival della Fotografia Etica in Lodi, Italy.

This body of work has received numerous awards including 1st Prize, Long-Term Projects in the 2016 World Press Photo Contest: 2nd place, Contemporary Issues in the 2018 World Press Photo Contest and the National Press Photographers Association’s Cliff Edom New America Award in 2014, 2015 and 2018.

Calvert has won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award twice and is a three-time Pulitzer Prize nominated finalist in Feature Photography.

In addition to being a guest faculty member of the Eddie Adams Workshop and the Western Kentucky University Mountain Workshops, she has been a member of the faculty for the DoD Visual Storytelling Workshop for the last twenty-five years. 

Calvert’s clients include: The New York Times, Yahoo News, Stern, Human Rights Watch, National Geographic, ESPN the Magazine, The Washington Post, The Washington Post Magazine,  New Jersey Magazine, Hamlin Fistula USA, T. Rowe Price, Harvard University, Boston University, San Francisco State University, CNN, The Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, Reuters, Mother Jones, CBS: Face the Nation, NBC News, Esquire, Elle, Cosmopolitan, The Los Angeles Times, AOL and Google.

Photograph by Kristin Ann Donaldson