Robert Pledge was born in 1942 in London, UK and moved to Paris, France at the age of ten. A student of West African languages and anthropology, he found his way into journalism as a specialist in African affairs. The president of Contact Press Images, which he founded with American photographer David Burnett in New York in 1976, he has edited many highly-acclaimed books and curated exhibitions throughout the world, in Amsterdam, Bamako, Beijing, Berlin, Brussels, Dhaka, Lausanne, London, Madrid, Mexico City, New Dehli, New York, Paris, and Tokyo. A major presence in the photographic community, he has conducted master classes in Bangladesh, China, India, Mali, Turkey, and Switzerland, and has sat on many juries, including the W. Eugene Smith Fund in the USA, the CNA Mosaique program in Luxembourg, and the World Press Photo Foundation in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, which he chaired in 2001. In 2004 he received the Overseas Press Club's "Olivier Rebbot Award" for the book Red-Color News Soldier, which he authored with Li Zhensheng. He commutes between Paris and New York.