David Friend, Vanity Fair's editor of creative development, served as Life magazine’s director of photography during the 1990s. Friend is the author of Watching the World Change: The Stories Behind the Images of 9/11 (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2006). He won Emmy and Peabody Awards as an executive producer of the CBS documentary 9/11, which has aired in more than 140 countries. Friend co-curated the exhibition “Vanity Fair Portraits: 1913-2008,” which opened February 14, 2008, at London's National Portrait Gallery (NPG), then traveled to the Scottish NPG, Edinburgh; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the NPG, Canberra.
As a correspondent, Friend has covered conflicts in Afghanistan, Lebanon, and elsewhere. As an editor, Friend broke the “Deep Throat” story in 2005, revealing that Mark Felt was Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s secret Watergate source. As a writer, Friend contributes frequently (on photographic and news subjects) to Vanity Fair, American Photo, and The Digital Journalist Web site. His humorous articles and cartoons have appeared in The Washington Post, Discover, The Common Review, and the on-line journal Salon. His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker.