Biography

Matthew S. Mahurin (born January 31, 1959) is an American illustrator, photographer and film director. Mahurin's illustrations appear in Time, Newsweek, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Forbes, and The New York Times.

Mahurin's work as a photo essayist has dealt with subjects such as homelessness, people with AIDS, the Texas prison system, abortion clinics, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Belfast. His extensive work directing music videos since 1986 have resulted in working with U2, Queensrÿche, Metallica, Dreams So Real, Tracy Chapman, Tom Waits, R.E.M., Alice In Chains, Def Leppard and many other popular music performers.

Photographs by Mahurin, including Clemmons Prison, Texas (1985), Texas Prison (1988), Woman's Face in Darkness (1989) and Paris (1984), are included in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Mahurin has a reputation for photographing himself and manipulating his own likeness in his commercial photo-illustration work. Examples of his own image appearing on magazine covers are the November 29, 1993 cover of Time, with Mahurin as Sigmund Freud, the March 14, 1994 cover of Time, with himself as a caveman and the May 17, 2004 Time cover where Mahurin posed and photographed himself as an Abu Ghraib prisoner.

Mahurin is also credited with a notorious Time cover of O. J. Simpson, featuring an altered mugshot which removed the photograph's color saturation (inadvertently making Simpson's skin darker), burned the corners, and reduced the size of the prisoner ID number. This appeared on newsstands next to an unaltered copy on the cover of Newsweek, which occasioned some controversy over photo manipulation.