Robert Nickelsberg is an American photojournalist based in Brooklyn, New York. He worked as a Time magazine contract photographer for nearly thirty years, specializing in political and cultural change in developing countries.
After covering Central and South America and the conflicts there in the mid-1980s, he moved his base to Asia. Living in New Delhi from 1988 to 1999, he recorded the rise of religious extremism in South Asia. He has documented Afghanistan since 1988, and his work has also taken him to Iraq, Kuwait, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar and Indonesia. From 1989 to 2011 he photographed the conflict in Kashmir, on both sides of the Line of Control.
His book Afghanistan: A Distant War (Prestel, 2013) brought together 25 years of work in Afghanistan and won the Overseas Press Club’s Olivier Rebbot Award. With Kehrer Verlag he published Legacy of Lies: El Salvador 1981–1984 (2024) and Kashmir, the Valley (2026).
