Justin Maxon is a 25-year-old award-winning photographer based out of San Francisco, and is currently working on a project in Philadelphia, Pa.

Maxon was born in a small town in the woods of northern California, called Orleans. He is mainly interested in pursuing long term projects that focus on the issues of poverty and social injustice.

Maxon discovered his passion for documentary photography while working on a project in San Francisco's Tenderloin, a neighborhood notorious for its poverty and glaring homeless epidemic. Currently, he is working on two long-term projects. One is back in the Tenderloin District, documenting the wide range of issues people living there face. The other project is in a small town outside Philadelphia, where he is exploring the importance of religious faith in overcoming community challenges from gang violence, high levels of pollution, to a defective public school system, among other issues.

Maxon has received a number of awards for his photography, from competitions like the Alexia Grant Foundation, NPPA's Best of Photojournalism, the Photo District News, the Atlanta Photojournalism Seminar, College Photographer of the Year, and the Hearst Awards Foundation Championship. Most notably, he recently won first place in the 2007 World Press Photo Daly Life Singles category, along with winning the International Photo Awards Deeper Perspective Photographer of the Year at the 2008 Lucie Awards.

His work has been published in The FADER, Newsweek, F2 Magazine, Washington Post, MSNBC, Photo District News, ESPN.com, and various other publications.

He is represented for assignment by Aurora Select.