Robert Nickelsberg worked as a TIME magazine contract photographer for nearly thirty years, specializing in political and cultural change in developing countries. After covering Central and South America and the conflicts taking place there in the mid 1980s, he established his base in Asia. Living in New Delhi from 1988 to 1999, Nickelsberg recorded the rise of religious extremism in South Asia. His work has also encompassed Iraq, Kuwait, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar and Indonesia. Nickelsberg has documented Afghanistan since 1988, when he accompanied a group of mujahideen crossing the border from Pakistan. His 2013 book, A Distant War, published by Prestel, captures his 25 years of work in Afghanistan. Nickelsberg was named the 2013 winner of the Overseas Press Club's Olivier Rebbot Award for Afghanistan-A Distant War given for the best photographic reporting from abroad in magazines and books. His photographs have been exhibited at The Philadelphia Museum of Art, the International Center of Photography, the Queensborough Community College, the Afghanistan Center at Kabul University and at The New America Foundation in New York.

He received grants for reporting on and photographing post-traumatic stress disease in Kashmir, India from the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma and the South Asian Journalism Association in 2008. In 2015, the O'Halloran Family Foundation presented Nickelsberg with a grant for his ongoing domestic sex trafficking project. Nickelsberg lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife, Crary Pullen, and is represented by Getty Images.