Photographer of life: as a staff photographer for the Los Angeles Times, Ginny Dixon covered the O.J. Simpson case, the 1992 L.A. riots, and the Northridge earthquake, winning two Pulitzers in the process. Her latest daring project? Portraits that show the beauty of women with disabilities.

Suddenly on the afternoon of February 8, photographer Ginny Dixon got a call from the Associated Press: The news agency could not get its photographers out of Miami fast enough to cover, a few miles north, Anna Nicole Smith's death in Hollywood, Fla., where Dixon lives. Could she, a former member of a Pulitzer Prize-winning photo team at the Los Angeles Times, rush over to Memorial Regional Hospital right away and document the troubled model's final demise?

Sure, she said. But when she arrived at the hospital, Dixon discovered that a promised press conference was not to be, leaving little to shoot. With nothing to do, some journalists began pulling random people from the nearby Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino to ask how they felt about the death of their fellow hotel patron. "That was such a farce," Dixon says, remembering the day. "It was chasing around nothing."

But as with so many other occasions, Dixon knew how to turn "nothing" into something. The 5-foot-6 blond went over to the Broward County medical examiner's lab, muscled her way past the aggressive paparazzi, plunked down the three-foot stepladder she always carries in her car for such reasons, and found the perfect angle to snap a decent portrait of the medical examiner his expression tired, his brow furrowed--telling the waiting press that the autopsy results could take weeks. By early that evening the shot had been beamed around the world on AP's various wires.

For Dixon, 46, who is out, the experience was business as usual. No longer a staff photographer for an outlet, her well-honed eye now focuses on a wider range of freelance projects, many with a charitable bent. They include her ongoing series "Uncensored Life: Raw Beauty," which shows off the beauty of women with disabilities rather than the disabilities themselves. The portraits will soon be turned into a book and exhibited across the country.

Dixon's early life sounds like the plot of a 1960s beat novel. At 19 the Florida native left the safety of her family in Fort Pierce and drove cross-country to California with a friend. When she arrived in Los Angeles she knew just one person: her uncle, a mortician. So she started a business to help him write death certificates. In five years she turned a profit, sold the business, and bankrolled an education in photojournalism.

"I was always messing around with cameras," Dixon says, "but I never thought I could make photojournalism a career."

It certainly helped that she started out at the Los Angeles Times, where she won a coveted internship while a student at California State University, Long Beach, that she parlayed into a full-time job. Although she ascribes her big break to luck--"Everything just fell into place," she says friends say she was simply talented.

"She was different, and differences always connect," says Jorge Carreon, a fellow journalism student and later Dixon's roommate. Carreon is also out, and both shared a passion for their college newspaper. "She has this incredible ability to sit back and listen," he says. "She cuts through all that bullshit, and her work, even then, showed you what's real."

Carreon has met his share of celebrities in running a successful movie publicity company in Los Angeles, but he still keeps a picture from those days of him and Dixon posing with Annie Leibovitz. The two had waited outside Brentano's, where the famed photographer was doing a book signing, to request an interview with her. Leibovitz gave them 10 minutes.

"We were so young and stupid," he says. "We felt like intrepid reporters, hot on the story, and when we got up the nerve to finally ask her really politely if she would step for an interview and picture, we were amazed when she did.

"We were thrilled when Annie shot a photo with Ginny's camera," he adds. "I think she signed Ginny's camera strap."

At the Times, where Dixon worked for eight years, local stories turned into international headlines: She became part of the pool at the O.J. Simpson trial, and she photographed violent crowds on the east side of Compton, Calif., during the 1992 riots after the acquittals of the officers who beat Rodney King.

"That was a thing you thought would be great to cover, but the police couldn't control anything and people were breaking and taking stuff," Dixon says of the riots. "It was very dangerous--not something I'd want to do again." The coverage netted Dixon and her colleagues a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for spot news reporting.

Her team won another Pulitzer in 1995 covering the 1994 Northridge earthquake. "I woke with a sharp jolt," Dixon recalls. She had been staying in the guesthouse of a friend's mansion, and the quake knocked the water out of the pool onto her doorstep. "Photographically you could never get a sense of the scale of the earthquake, but the damage was widespread. When you're making a picture of something like that, you have to strike the right balance. You're capturing people on the worst days of their lives, and you are trying not to be too intrusive, but you want to show them in the moment and show them with some dignity and respect."

Dixon says she learned a lot about photojournalism during such breaking news events. But she learned an even more important life lesson during an assignment at an Eddie Adams Workshop in upstate New York in 1991. At the prestigious four-day gathering of top photojournalists and photojournalism students from around the country, Dixon photographed a man dying from cancer--a subject that would become especially meaningful a year later when she herself was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Doctors gave her a 15% chance of surviving chemotherapy. She was 31.

"You take these pictures, and you don't think about it, really," she says of that time. "But when I had cancer, all the things this man talked to me about took on new meaning. He talked about how he didn't recognize himself anymore when he looked in the mirror--I now understood that personally."

Her ovarian cancer was very rare and very serious. The grueling form of chemotherapy she underwent--which doctors said could actually kill her--was almost worse than the disease itself. She was in the hospital seven days with each treatment, and by the time she would start to feel better, it would be time to go back to the hospital for another round. It was little things that reminded her how vulnerable she had become.

"Generally, you get up in the morning, you fix your makeup, you do your hair," she says. "But when you have cancer it gets to the point where you have nothing to do: You have no eyelashes, no eyebrows, no hair--and I'm a person with a ton of hair. It's almost like being reborn."

She saw her life through new eyes. "Looking back, I was lucky to gain a whole new perspective at such an early age," she says. "Up until then my life had been all about photography, about moving up. Then it changed, and I realized if I didn't have my health, I didn't have anything."

So she quit her job at the Times. "My whole identity was being a photojournalist--that all went away when I had cancer," Dixon says. "I realized I'm not my camera. I'm blessed with making some pretty good pictures, and that's what I love to do, but I realized I can do a whole lot of things besides just photography. It became really important to me to be closer to my family."

In 1996 she moved back to Florida to be closer to them. She and her mother, Vonda Lee Dixon, started a nonprofit called Points of Life that raises money to develop an early detection test for ovarian cancer. And instead of chasing breaking news for a big paper, she started her own freelance photography business.

Of her subjects in "Uncensored Life: Raw Beauty," she says: "I was really inspired by them, particularly the people who were blind, since I make a living by what I see. These women do such amazing things--really accomplished women who don't see themselves as their disability. I hope the photos show that."

The series was exhibited at Miami's Dorsch Gallery in May 2006, then in October at Aperture Pro Studios in the Miami Design District. Since the exhibits, she's received letters from women with disabilities from across the country who said they'd like to be photographed. So she's taking the project, which includes the work of other photographers, nationwide. The profits benefit the Center for Independent Living of South Florida, a nonprofit agency that teaches independent living skills and provides housing, job placement, and computer training to anyone with a disability or sensory challenge. An estimated 250,000 such people live in Miami--Dade County.

Now cancer-free for over a decade, Dixon refuses to slow down--and refuses to let work take over the rest of her life. She spends time with her parents and friends, and she loves her students at the Miami Ad School, where she has taught since 1996 and is now associate director of photography. "As long as I'm up to something meaningful in this life," she says, "I'm happy."

Christensen is an investigative producer with CNN.