Patti Gower worked as a staff photographer for The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star from 1989 to 2003. She left her newspaper career in 2003 to pursue self-directed photography projects. During her time as a newspaper photographer she was awarded a National Newspaper Award for feature photography and is the first photographer to win an Atkinson Fellowship for a project on adoption in Canada. She belongs to the group Photosensitive, a collective of photographers, in Toronto, working on social documentary issues. Gower has participated in numerous group national and international exhibitions and had a solo exhibition in this year's Contact Festival of Photography. Some of her self-directed work has included AIDS in Zambia; Korean adoptions– adult adoptees returning to their birth country to meet birth relative; Canadian adoption of American black infants; Aboriginal Canadians and Catholicism; Rotterdam city programme which houses and supplies market value illicit drugs to senior aged addicts; Canadians infected with HIV and Hepatitis C through the blood supply system; Fred Dunn, an eighty-year-old hermit, poet and political activist, who has spent the last 14 years of his life living outside, in a ravine in urban downtown Toronto; and Krakow, Poland–10 years after the fall. Her most recent work has included Canadian military in Haiti; Canadian Red Cross Hospital in Gonaives, Haiti; development aid in Tanzania; and water issues in rural Ontario. She is available for assignment work and can be reached through the CONTACT section.