Late photojournalist Danish Siddiqui was among four Indian journalists to be honoured with the prestigious Pulitzer Prize 2022 under the Feature Photography category on Monday.
Siddique, Adnan Abidi, Sanna Irshad Mattoo, and Amit Dave from the Reuters news agency won the award for “images of COVID’s toll in India that balanced intimacy and devastation, while offering viewers a heightened sense of place,” as per the citation, which also noted that their work was moved from the Breaking News Photography category by the jury.
This marks the second Pulitzer Prize for Siddique, who previously won the award in 2018 under the same Feature Photography category as part of the Reuters team for their coverage of the Rohingya refugee crisis.
38-year-old Siddique was killed in 2021 while covering a clash between Afghan security forces and Taliban forces in Spin Boldak, near the Pakistan border. The New Delhi-based photojournalist had extensively covered the Afghanistan conflict, the Hong Kong protests, and other major events in Asia, Middle East, and Europe, over the course of his career.
This year’s award is the third Pulitzer Prize for Abidi, who is also based in the capital city. He previously won the honour for coverage of the Rohingya crisis in 2018 and the Hong Kong protests in 2020.
Mattoo and Dave are based in Jammu & Kashmir and Ahmedabad, respectively.
The Pulitzer for Breaking News Photography was shared by Marcus Yam of the Los Angeles Times “for raw and urgent images of the US departure from Afghanistan that capture the human cost of the historic change in the country” and McNamee, Drew Angerer, Spencer Platt, Samuel Corum and Jon Cherry of Getty Images for their “comprehensive and consistently riveting photos of the attack on the US Capitol.”
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This year’s Pulitzer Prize Board also awarded a special citation to the journalists of Ukraine for their “courage, endurance, and commitment to truthful reporting during Vladimir Putin’s ruthless invasion of their country and his propaganda war in Russia.”
“Despite bombardment, abductions, occupation, and even deaths in their ranks, they have persisted in their effort to provide an accurate picture of a terrible reality, doing honour to Ukraine and to journalists around the world,” the citation said.
The 19-member Pulitzer Board is composed of leading journalists and news executives from media outlets across the United States, as well as five academics in the field of arts. The dean of Columbia’s school of journalism and the administrator of the prizes are non-voting members.