Growing up in Little Washington, Pennsylvania, Joe Amon joined the Marine Corps in 1976, at the age of 17. After serving six years, he returned home and took a job in his hometown steel mill. When the mill closed two years later, leaving Joe without a job, he saw a TV ad from The Art Institute of Pittsburgh, which claimed, “We will teach you to be a photographer.†Wanting to document the kind of tragedies he had witnessed as a Marine in Beirut, Joe applied, was accepted and in 1989 graduated with honors with an associate degree and strong skills in both commercial photography and photojournalism. Beginning his first job as photojournalist at The Valley Independent in Monessen, Pennsylvania, he quickly rose to chief photographer. In 1998 he joined the staff of The Free Lance-Star where he worked as both a photojournalist and a picture editor until 2004, when he became a staffer at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Amon joined the photography staff at The Denver Post in 2008. His project “Aids Orphans†done while he was in Florida, received the Robert F. Kennedy Prize for International Photography and in 2012, his work on the use of “Heroin in Denver†was recognized by POYi in Issue Reporting Picture Story and honored with the Community Service Photojournalism Award by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Amon and lives in Arvada, Colorado, with his two sons, Ben and Matt.