David Trood fell in love with the camera when he was sixteen years old, and he was soon developing his own photographs in a homemade darkroom made of black plastic garbage bags in a wool shed. He was lucky to get a job at a newspaper as a young apprentice when he was about seventeen. After working for two years for The Sydney Morning Herald in Australia, David traveled throughout Asia for two years with a backpack and ended up in Denmark in 1991 where he married and had children.
After a 22-year period of freelancing, mainly in Denmark, he landed a contract with Getty Images in 2003. “This enabled me to pursue the true form of photography that has interested me all along. . . people, animals and nature—the world we live in,” says David. His work has been used in overseas campaigns through Getty Images. Today, Trood has one of the most diverse photo collections online at www.gettyimages.com, with studio photos, nature and wildlife shots, portraits, creative shots and documentary imagery.
Every year Hasselblad Camera honors twelve photographers from around the world who use their cameras for excellence in photography, and in 2006, David was a recipient of this Hasselblad Master Award.
In 2007, after winning second place in the portrait category of the annual Photography Masters Cup awards, Trood stopped photography for two years to write a book about his own creative journey as a photographer and to seek answers to the philosophic question, “From where does creativity arise? That quest resulted in his book, At Any Given Moment (www.atanygivenmoment.com).
Part of that personal journey involved creating the Face of Humanity, a project motivated by the realization that we are all one and that our collective being could be represented photographically. David developed a method of photographing people so that their eyes were precisely placed, so the portraits later could be easily merged. Of the thousands of people he photographed, David ensured he was covering the representative proportion of world’s ethnic demographics at that time. Using these ratios, he then selected and merged 670 photos to create the Face of Humanity, an image that graces the cover of his book.
In 2010, David began planning the photo shoot of his life: creating the Face of the USA. In 2011 Trood will complete that project, merging a proportionally accurate number of photos, based on the ethnic demographics of the USA, into the collective Face of the USA.
