Christian Gooden’s career as a photojournalist began more than a quarter century ago with his first experience covering international breaking news immediately after the explosion of the 1996 Olympic Park bomb in Atlanta. While still a journalism student at Morehouse College and working as a lab technician in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s photo department, he responded immediately, helping to move the AJC’s award-winning photo report of the infamous event to press for the world community.

Following graduation and a two-year stint as lead photographer at the (Milledgeville, Ga.) Union Recorder Knight-Ridder’s smallest daily at the time, he returned home to St. Louis and eventually started at the Post-Dispatch.

Eighteen years later, he was an instrumental member of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography team that delivered “powerful images of the despair and anger in Ferguson, Mo., stunning photojournalism that served the community while informing the country."

In 2018, he won an Honorable Mention the National Press Photographers Association’s Best of Photojournalism Domestic News category for coverage of protests that broke out after the acquittal of former St. Louis Police Officer Jason Stockley for murder of Anthony Lamar Smith

He is a native of University City, Mo., likes to study post-Reconstruction African American history and is a voracious national politics junkie.