James Hill is a leading photographer and photojournalist and his images have won many of photography’s most important prizes including World Press Photo, the Pulitzer Prize, the Visa d’Or at Perpignan’s Visa Pour L’Image, and awards from The Overseas Press Club of America and the NPPA.

He began his career after studies at Oxford University and the London College of Printing, leaving England for the Soviet Union in the autumn of 1991.

Immediately thrown into the strife of the war-torn republics of the former Soviet Union he worked initially as a freelancer before joining The New York Times on contract in 1995. He was based first in Moscow and then in Rome, from where he departed to cover the battles of the US led war on terror in Afghanistan in 2001 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

He returned to Moscow in 2003 to focus on Russia and longer projects as well as in-depth news features. In 2020 he moved to Paris where he is currently based. Hill is recognised, in particular, for blending a style of environmental portraits and landscapes, and mixing an artistic and journalistic awareness of the world around him.

His series of books and exhibitions have been supported by both governmental and commercial agencies. Among recent projects were "Victory Day," an extensive portrait series of more than 500 Russian WWII veterans published with the support of the British Council and "Days of San Isidro," a study on bullfighting commissioned by the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. "Somewhere Between War and Peace," an examination of the emotional and artistic forces dominating a photographer’s career, as published by Kehrer Verlag. The New Yorker described the book as a description of a photojournalist’s world — "an unsettling existence filled with ghosts, confusion, and discomfort."

In 2019 he published "The Castle" with Kehrer Verlag, a twenty-year project about his wife’s home in France and in 2022 "Art for Architecture, Moscow" with DOM, a monograph on Soviet era mosaics in Moscow.

His work has been shown in solo exhibits in both state and commercial galleries worldwide. His photographs are also in the permanent collections of the Pushkin Museum, the Moscow House of Photography, The Houston Museum of Fine Arts, as well as institutional and private collections.