The artistic work of documentary photographer Miron Zownir has consistently addressed the social challenges of its time for more than four decades. Like few contemporary photographers, he has managed to create an extraordinarily consistent photographic body of work across all decades. Zownir, the "Poet of Radical Photography," as the legendary American author Terry Southern once called him, has been portraying people in conflict-ridden social environments in a distinctive way since the late 1970s and has remained loyal to his socially critical subjects to this day.

Miron Zownir was born in 1953 in Karlsruhe, Germany, to German-Ukrainian parents. His photographic career began in 1975 when he moved to West Berlin and started working with analog black-and-white photography. This was followed by a one-year stay in London in 1978/79, where he further developed his creative potential in the genre of street photography. His early photographs provide insights into a time when persistent social conflicts were eroding the economy and society in the United Kingdom, leading to the decade's most severe political crisis, the "Winter of Despair." In 1980, Miron Zownir emigrated to the United States and lived for eight and a half years in New York City. His photographic documentation of the New York subculture of the 1980s shaped his reputation as the most radical documentary photographer of his generation. After moving to Los Angeles and Pittsburgh, Zownir returned to Berlin in 1995, where he has lived and worked ever since.

In 1995, Zownir traveled to Moscow, where he documented the humanitarian crisis following the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the shadow of public attention, he encountered a situation that he described at the time as "Dante's Inferno." He photographed homeless people, the dying, and the dead on the streets, train stations, and underpasses of the Russian capital. This brutal confrontation with a social tragedy, covered by a veil of silence, further strengthened Zownir's focus on societal upheavals and the harshness of life. In the following decades, Zownir remained true to his approach of addressing socially critical topics. For example, between 2012 and 2014, he worked with Ukrainian author Kateryna Mishchenko, as part of the "Border Crosser" fellowship from the Robert Bosch Foundation, on the photobook UKRAINIAN NIGHT, which documented the political and social situation in Ukraine. In 2016, he traveled to the United States and photographed impoverished neighborhoods in affluent West Coast cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles. In 2018, with his series ROMANIA RAW, he drew attention to the inhumane living conditions of Roma families near Cluj Napoca. In his photo series ISTANBUL (2019/2020), Zownir showed the diverse realities of life for people in Turkey's largest city, reflecting a social reality that also includes an ever-growing poverty and social taboos. Another international project was Zownir's work in Canada in 2023, where he documented the fentanyl crisis in Vancouver and the challenges faced by the First Nations in Winnipeg. In 2024, a photographic project from Italy added a new facet to his work, expanding his street photography in the European context.

Zownir's works have been featured in numerous international solo and group exhibitions. In the exhibition El Salvaje Europeo (CCCB, 2004), the Centre de Cultura Contemporània in Barcelona presented Zownir's photographs alongside works by Picasso, Ribera, Cranach the Elder, Goya, Buñuel, and Dürer. Other museum exhibitions followed, such as the DARKSIDE I (2008) at the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, which focused on photography as a means of representation and as an important visual catalyst for sexuality, featuring works by Helmut Newton, Hans Bellmer, Man Ray, Pierre Molinier, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, Nan Goldin, Larry Clark, Joel Peter Witkin, Bill Brandt, Brassai, Nobuyoshi Araki, Francesca Woodman, Boris Mikhailov, and others. DARKSIDE II (2009), also at the Fotomuseum Winterthur, addressed the human body under the influence of destructive forces such as violence, illness, war, death, and dying. This unique collection included photographs by Miron Zownir from Russia, as well as images by American reportage and war photographers like W. Eugene Smith and Oliver Noonan, the legendary photojournalist and police photographer Weegee, and works by Alvin Balltrop, Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Larry Clark, and Don McCullin.

In 2016, the Haus der Photographie/Deichtorhallen in Hamburg dedicated a comprehensive retrospective to Zownir with over a hundred photographs, curated by Ingo Taubhorn. That same year, Zownir was awarded for his photos under the title "Shooting from the Sidelines," published in Zoo Magazine No. 49, at the LEAD AWARDS 2016 in the category of Documentary Photography of the Year. The Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg (2019) and the Museum für Fotografie in Berlin (2020) presented Zownir's early photographs from Berlin and New York in the exhibition WOLFGANG SCHULZ UND DIE FOTOSZENE UM 1980. Both museums dedicated an exhibition to this important turning point in the history of West German photography, showcasing the work of legendary photography editor Wolfgang Schulz and outstanding works from photographers whose images shaped the years around 1980.

The Reinbeckhallen Foundation – Collection for Contemporary Art presented Zownir's early Berlin photographs in the 2020/21 photo exhibition BERLIN 1945–2000: A PHOTOGRAPHIC SUBJECT, alongside works by other German and international photographers who captured Berlin between the immediate postwar years and the end of the 20th century, such as Sibylle Bergemann, Gundula Schulze-Eldowy, Arno Fischer, Nan Goldin, Herbert Hensky, Will McBride, and Roger Melis. The exhibition was curated by Dr. Candice M. Hamelin. Under the direction of Italian photographer Letizia Battaglia, who passed away in 2022, the Centro Internazionale di Fotografia in Palermo held a comprehensive retrospective of Zownir's work in 2021. The exhibition Zeitwirdknapp / Non c’è più tempo, featuring works created between 1977 and 2019, was realized in collaboration with the Goethe Institute Palermo. In 2022, Zownir's photographs from the UKRAINIAN NIGHT series were shown at the Weserburg – Museum für Moderne Kunst in Bremen, as well as at the Kunstmuseum Gelsenkirchen.

In the 2023/24 exhibition DIX UND DIE GEGENWART at DEICHTORHALLEN Hamburg, 50 of Zownir's photographs were displayed. Five series from different decades, focusing on human destinies in cities such as Moscow, London, New York City, West Berlin, Berlin, and American metropolises like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Las Vegas, were juxtaposed with Dix's five etching portfolios Der Krieg from 1924. Dix used grotesque elements in his work to highlight the social and political structures of the Weimar Republic and deconstruct stereotypical notions. Similarly, Zownir portrays people on the margins of society, those excluded from the usual social functioning context. Through decades and generations of the 20th and 21st centuries, a gallery of works by two artists emerges, confronting the viewer with a brutal reality and the resulting despair.

Since 2014, Miron Zownir has been represented at international photography fairs in London, Paris, and Los Angeles, and worldwide in solo and group exhibitions by the Cologne-based gallery Bene Taschen, which represents some of the most renowned artists in contemporary photography, including Sebastião Salgado, William Claxton, Arlene Gottfried, Larry Fink, Jamel Shabazz, Jeff Mermelstein, David LaChapelle, Gregory Bojorquez, and Joseph Rodriguez.