Suau started his career at the Chicago Sun Times in 1976 and later joined the Denver Post. In 1985, he moved to New York City to work for Black Star agency. He was a contract photographer for Time magazine between 1991 and 2009. Suau was one of the co-founders of the non-profit collective Facing Change: Documenting America, which was founded in 2009 by a group of social minded photographers and writers to document the issues facing the United States during a time of economic crisis.
In 1995, he published two books with the French publisher Actes Sud, one about the war in Chechnya and the other about the genocide in Rwanda. Suau completed a ten-year project in 1999, entitled Beyond the Fall, which documented the transformation of the former Soviet bloc. An exhibition of that work was presented in London, New York, Washington, and in more than a dozen cities throughout Europe. His most recent book, Fear This, gives a look at the Iraq War as seen from the United States.
Anthony Suau has won many awards, including two World Press Photo of the Year awards, in 1988 and in 2009. He received a Pulitzer Prize for his images of the famine in Ethiopia, and in 1996 he was the recipient of the Robert Capa Gold Medal for his coverage of the war in Chechnya. In 1985 and in 2005 he was awarded the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography in New York.
He has been based in Europe for 20 years and returned to live in New York in 2008.
