Renée C. Byer
Renée C. Byer (1958) was born in Yonkers, New York. Since 2003, she has served as the senior photojournalist at The Sacramento Bee. In 2007, Byer won a Pulitzer Prize for her photo essay "A Mother's Journey". Byer was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2013, "For her heartwarming photographs of a grandfather raising three grandchildren after the violent death of his daughter and the loss of his wife to cancer." Early life Byer was first introduced to photography by her father who had a dark room in their apartment in the Bronx. She was given her first camera, a Brownie Starmite II Kodak, by her mother for her 8th birthday, and went on to study photography in high school and took the pictures for the school yearbook. She went to Ulster County Community College to study art and humanities, before transferring to Bradley University in Peoria, IL where she majored in art and mass communications. Career Byer worked for different newspapers before starting at the Sacramento Bee as a documentary photojournalist. A Mother's Journey "A Mother's Journey", her photo series which won her the Pulitzer prize for Feature Photography in 2007 was shot over the course of a year,