Matt Mahurin

Matt Mahurin (born January 31, 1959, Santa Cruz, California) 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, Jaye Muller (J.), Tracy Chapman, Tom Waits, R.E.M., Alice In Chains 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.

Film and video

• Eastman Kodak Award for Lifetime Achievement - Music Video Production Association Award (2003)
• Best American Independent Feature - Hamptons International Film Festival, for Mugshot (1996)
• MTV Video Music Award for Best Post-Modern Video, Orange Crush by R.E.M. (1989)

Photography and Photo-Illustration

• Alfred Eisenstaedt Awards for Magazine Photography "Cover Photograph of the year" for January 1997 cover of Rolling Stone of Marilyn Manson, and "Cutting Edge Photo Illustration" (1998)
• Art Directors Club, Merit Award for Feature Spread Illustration published by The Village Voice, "Unsafe: Why Gay Men Are Having Risky Sex" (1996)

Director

• BoDeans — Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams cover, 1986
• Tracy Chapman — Tracy Chapman cover, 1988
• Ramones — Brain Drain, cover, 1989
• Ozzy Osbourne — No More Tears, cover, 1991
• Joe Satriani — The Extremist cover, 1992
• Marilyn Manson — Rolling Stone cover, January 1998 issue
• Tom Waits — Mule Variations cover, 2000
• Tom Waits — Alice, cover and concept, 2002
• Joan as Police Woman— To Survive cover, 2008
• Muse — Drones cover, 2015
• Fool In The Box — Fool In The Box III cover, 2018