J-10 Connect
J-10 Connect is an opportunity for recent alumni to connect with one another and with current students. One alumnus from the last ten graduating class years will be featured each month.
This alumnus will be open to email communication with other J-10 alumni and current students for 10 days starting on the 10th of each month. To contact our featured alumnus, email any questions you may have for him/her to j-10connect@columbia.edu or j10connect@columbia.edu.
We are excited to announce our fourth feature, John Wendle '07, an independent journalist in Kabul, Afghanistan.
J-10 Connect Profile #4:
John Wendle '07
Independent Reporter, Photojournalist and Videographer in Kabul, Afghanistan
I am an independent reporter, photojournalist and videographer based in Kabul, Afghanistan. I currently write for Time and am represented by Polaris Images. My work has been featured in Time, on CNN and Channel 4 News, and in various other outlets.
I have spent more than four months embedded with U.S. soldiers and marines in some of Afghanistan’s most infamous battlefields, like the Arghandab in Kandahar and Marjah in Helmand, and on a mountaintop outpost in northern Kunar province on the Pakistani border. I have also photographed victims of war and multiple bombings in Kabul. In December I narrowly missed being blown up when a suicide bomber
attacked a crowd of Shia worshippers marking the Ashura holy day.
I returned to freelancing in February 2011 after spending a year and a half working as a photographer for a USAID-funded agricultural project in Helmand and Kandahar provinces and across the north.
Before coming to Afghanistan in 2009, I reported for Time in Moscow, covering the war between Russia and Georgia in 2008 and various political and social issues ranging from police brutality to Moscow Fashion Week. I worked for The Moscow Times beginning in 2007, before moving to Time.
Before attending Columbia J-School, I worked as deputy editor of the Caspian Business News in Baku, Azerbaijan. I started covering conflict there while photographing violent anti-government street protests during that country’s parliamentary elections, but my interest in oil and Islam began when I served as a Peace Corps volunteer across the sea in Aktau, Kazakhstan.
My sister Abby also attended the J-School and now works as a radio producer for This Land Press. My mom and dad were both school teachers and my dad was actively involved in local politics, having led Ohio’s first teacher’s strike and marches against the Vietnam War.
My education at the Journalism School helped give me some of the many tools necessary to reporting and photographing in some of the world's harshest environments.
—John Wendle '07
J-10 Connect Profile Archive
Profile #1: Nina Gregory '06
Profile #2: Abigail Hauslohner, M.A. '09 (Politics)
Profile #3: Andrew Springer '11