Tributes paid to Pulitzer-winning photographer
HUNDREDS of people gathered in New Delhi as Pulitzer Prizewinning news photographer Danish Siddiqui was buried at his university last Sunday (19), two days after he was killed covering fighting between Afghan security forces and the Taliban near a border crossing with Pakistan.
Siddiqui, an Indian national with the Reuters news agency, was embedded with Afghan special forces in the former Taliban bastion of Kandahar when he died, the news agency said last Friday (16).
The 38-year-old’s body arrived in New Delhi on a flight from Afghanistan late last Sunday and his coffin was taken to his home where hundreds of friends and news media colleagues had gathered outside. Siddiqui is survived by his wife and two young children. An estimated 500 people later took part in final prayers for Siddiqui at his alma mater, Jamia Millia Islamia university, in Delhi, according to a photographer at the campus. He was then buried in the graveyard on the campus.
Tributes had poured in for Siddiqui in India after reports of his death. Candlelight vigils were held by journalists in several Indian cities last Saturday (17).
Siddiqui was part of a team that shared the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for documenting the Rohingya refugee crisis.
In recent months, his searing photographs capturing the coronavirus pandemic in India have spread across the world. “Ninety per cent of the photography I have learnt has come from experimentation in the field,” Siddiqui once wrote.
“What I enjoy most is capturing the human face of a breaking story. I shoot for the common man who wants to see and feel a story from a place where he can’t be present himself.”
He had also covered the war in Iraq, the Hong Kong protests and Nepal earthquakes since he started working for Reuters in 2010, the agency said.
Friends and colleagues described a man who cared deeply about the stories he covered, carrying out meticulous research before embarking on assignments and always focusing on the people caught up in the news. “Even in breaking news cycles he would think about humanising a story, and you see that so often in his pictures, including those that won the Pulitzer and stories we have done in the last few years,” said Devjyot Ghoshal, a Reuters correspondent based in New Delhi and a neighbour of Siddiqui.
Last year, while covering sectarian unrest in a Delhi suburb, Siddiqui and Ghoshal saw a man being chased by a frenzied mob. The images were widely featured in international media, highlighting the danger of wider conflagration between India’s Hindu majority and sizeable Muslim minority. Siddiqui, a Muslim, had a narrow escape when the mob turned their attention on him. Siddiqui provided video and text from his assignments as well as photographs. On his final assignment, he was embedded with Afghan special forces in the city of Kandahar.
Earlier last week he was travelling with a convoy of commandos when it came under heavy fire from Taliban militants on the outskirts of Kandahar. He captured the drama in pictures, film and words.