Reuters wins Pulitzer for intimate and devastating images of India's Covid pandemic

Reuters wins Pulitzer for intimate and devastating images of India's Covid pandemic
At the height of the pandemic, many victims were cremated without their family members being allowed to attend.
May 11, 2022, 8:56 am

The Pulitzer Prize for feature photography is awarded to Adnan Abidi, Sanna Irshad Mattoo, Amit Dave and the late Danish Siddiqui of Reuters for the coverage of COVID in India/Reuters

Reuters photographers produced coverage of the coronavirus pandemic in India that captured the spread of the disease and its remorseless toll. They took images from hospitals, funeral pyres and remote villages to a Himalayan hillside, car parks and temples.

Pulitzer jury said that the Reuters team won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for pictures balancing "intimacy and devastation while offering viewers a heightened sense of place."

India Chief Photographer Danish Siddiqui, who died in July 2021 while covering the war in Afghanistan, took many of the pictures, including an aerial shot of fires from a mass cremation lighting up a Delhi housing estate, Devdiscourse citing Reuters.

Reuters photographers took images from hospitals, funeral pyres and remote villages to a Himalayan hillside, car parks and temples/Reuters

Ahmad Masood, Reuters Asia Chief Photographer, said that "Danish owned this story from the start. He broke news with his pictures, showing the scale of the devastation both in Delhi and rural areas. This is a testament to his courage and dedication to journalism."

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Just a month before he left for Afghanistan, Siddiqui was on the phone to Sanna Irshad Mattoo, a photojournalist in Kashmir, discussing a different way to illustrate the pandemic. They decided she would visit one of the most remote vaccination camps in the country, on a steep Himalayan hillside.

Adnan Abidi, a friend and colleague of Siddiqui who worked with him for over a decade, took a number of the photographs cited by the Pulitzer Prize jury.

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At the height of the pandemic, many victims were cremated without their family members being allowed to attend. Abidi took one heartbreaking image of volunteers carrying away a bag containing unclaimed ashes from a crematorium.

Abidi said: "We had to come back home to our family. This is a tribute to him (Siddiqui) from the whole Reuters team," said Abidi, who has been on two previous Pulitzer Prize-winning teams, one with Siddiqui. "I really miss him... I wish he was here with us."

Source: devdiscourse

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