Slain photojournalist Danish, 3 other Indians awarded Pulitzer 2022
HT Correspondents
NEW DELHI: Slain photojournalist Danish Siddiqui and three of his colleagues from Reuters — Adnan Abidi, Sanna Irshad Mattoo and Amit Dave — were awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in the Feature Photography category for their work on documenting India’s battle against the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Siddiqui, who also won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for Feature Photography for documenting the Rohingya Refugee Crisis, was killed last year while covering the war between Afghan troops and the Taliban in Kandahar. His work on capturing images of funeral pyres of Covid-19 victims at mass cremation sites in Delhi last year had garnered widespread applause. Apart from this, he had extensively covered conflicts around the world.
Taking to Twitter, the Pulitzer Prizes team congratulated the Siddiqui’s friends and family, the three other photographers and Reuters, an international news agency. Their work, which was moved from the breaking photography category by the judges, “balanced intimacy and devastation, while offering viewers a heightened sense of place,” the Pulitzer Prize committee wrote.
Danish’s father Akhtar Siddiqui said the family was happy to see Danish’s work getting recognised. “Danish is no longer with us, but he continues to make us proud and happy. The award is recognition for his hard work, dedication, and value-based journalism.”
Adnan Abidi, has also received the Pulitzer Prize before — first in 2018 for his reportage on the Rohingya exodus and in 2020 for coverage of Hong Kong protests.
Sanna Irshad Mattoo, the first Kashmiri woman to win the Pulitzer, won the Prize for her photograph of a health care worker administering a Covid vaccine dose to a shepherd in Kashmir.
Amit Dave was conferred the prize for his photograph of a veiled woman getting her body temperature checked at a brick kiln in Gujarat.