Ron Tarver

The Basketball Game: Black African American urban cowboys in Philadelphia

1993/2026

Ron Tarver is a professor of Studio Art specializing in Photography at Swarthmore College. He served as staff photographer at the Philadelphia Inquirer for 32 years, and his work has appeared in National Geographic, Life, Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker, and Black and White Magazine. He is co-author of the book We Were There: Voices of African American Veterans, published by Harper Collins in 2004, which was accompanied by a traveling exhibition. Tarver shares a 2012 Pulitzer Prize at the Inquirer for his work on a series documenting school violence in the Philadelphia public school system, and was nominated for a second Pulitzer in 2013 for a series exploring dog-training programs in prisons. A recipient of the prestigious Pew Fellowship in the Arts, he has also received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, as well as an Independence Foundation Fellowship. He was named one of the Delaware Valley's "50 Rising Stars in the Arts" by Seven Arts Magazine and is a Center for Emerging Visual Artists Fellow. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in over 30 solo and 50 group exhibitions and is included in many private, corporate, and museum collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg, Oklahoma Museum of History, and the National Museum of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Tarver offers private photography instruction, workshops, and photo excursions through his company, Photo-Ops.