Renée C. Byer


Renée C. Byer is the senior photojournalist at The Sacramento Bee, where she has worked since 2003.
In 2007, Byer won a Pulitzer Prize for her photo essay "A Mother's Journey".
Byer was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2013, "For her heartwarming photographs of a grandfather raising three grandchildren after the violent death of his daughter and the loss of his wife to cancer."

Early life

Byer was first introduced to photography by her father who had a dark room in their apartment in the Bronx. Then her mother gave Renée her first camera or her 8th birthday, a Brownie Starmite II Kodak. She studied photography in high school and took the pictures for the yearbook. She went to Ulster County Community College to study art and humanities. She then transferred to Bradley University in Peoria, IL and majored in art and mass communications.

Career

Byer worked for different newspapers before starting at the Sacramento Bee as a documentary photojournalist.

A Mother's Journey

"A Mother's Journey", her photo series which won her the Pulitzer prize for Feature Photography in 2007 was shot over the course of a year, about the relationship between a mother, Cyndie French and her 11 years old son Derek who was battling neuroblastoma, a type of cancer.

Living on a Dollar a Day

Byers worked for four years on a photography project called Living on a Dollar a Day. She collaborated with Thomas A. Nazario to write the book Living on a Dollar a Day: The Lives and Faces of the World’s Poor released in April 2014. They travelled on four continents, in ten different countries for the San Francisco-based nonprofit The Forgotten International detailing the lives of women, children, and families around the world living in extreme poverty. The book won First Place Documentary Book from the International Photography Awards in 2014, and a documentary about the project was released in 2016 narrated by Byer herself.
The Dalai Lama wrote a foreword for the book where he states, “Living on a Dollar a Day shows images of women, children and families in our global community who suffer every day from the effects of extreme poverty. Their stories tell us that they have the same hopes and dreams for themselves and for their children as anyone else in the world.”

Personal life

Byer is married to fellow Sacramento Bee photographer Paul Kitagaki, Jr.

Awards