Four Indians, including the slain photojournalist Danish Siddiqui, will share the renowned Pulitzer Prize for feature photography in 2022.
His photographs of COVID’s toll in India “combined intimacy and tragedy while offering viewers a heightened feeling of locality” won him the Pulitzer Prize on Monday.
The judges decided to transfer their work out of the “breaking news” category.
Siddiqui, a 38-year-old Afghan national, was killed in Afghanistan last year. In July of last year, the award-winning journalist was slain in Kandahar city’s Spin Boldak area while reporting on confrontations between the Afghan army and the Taliban.
Siddiqui has now received the Pulitzer Prize two times in a row. As a member of the Reuters team covering the Rohingya crisis, he received the prestigious award in 2018. He’d covered the war in Afghanistan, the riots in Hong Kong, and several other significant events in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe extensively.
From IIT Delhi to the Indian Institute of Management, Delhi, he has earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and an MBA (IIM). While at Jamia’s AJK Mass Communication Research Centre (MCRC) in 2007, he received a degree in mass communication with high honors.
A former television news reporter who later transitioned to photography, he began working for Reuters as an intern in 2010.
Los Angeles Times photographer Marcus Yam won the award for Breaking News photography “for raw and urgent photographs of the US pullout from Afghanistan that highlight the human cost of the momentous change in country.”
In the end, the judges decided against Mr. Yam’s work. They won the Breaking News photography award for their “extensive and constantly captivating photos of the US Capitol attack.”
This newspaper’s “compellingly told and vividly portrayed narrative” chronicled one of America’s worst days on January 6, 2021.
The Pulitzer Board praised Ukrainian journalists’ “courage, persistence, and devotion to truthful reporting” during President Vladimir Putin’s “savage invasion of their land” and “propaganda campaign in Russia.”
According to the committee, they “persisted in their endeavor to present a genuine depiction of a horrendous reality, paying respect to Ukraine and journalists worldwide” according to the committee.
After Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian-American journalist died in 1911; he endowed Columbia University with money. His contribution helped establish the Pulitzer Prizes in 1917 and the Pulitzer School of Journalism.
Pulitzer’s 19-person board includes top journalists and news managers from across the country, plus five academics and artists. Non-voting members include the journalism school dean and the prize administrator. Each year, the board’s most senior member or members assume the chair.