Kashmiri photojournalist shares Pulitzer with slain Danish Siddiqui & two others
New York: A Kashmiri photojournalist, Sanna Irshad Mattoo shared the prestigious Pulitzer Prize 2022 in the feature photography category with slain photojournalist Danish Siddiqui and two others.
Siddiqui and his colleagues Adnan Abidi, Sanna Irshad Mattoo and Amit Dave from the Reuters news agency won the award, announced on Monday, for “images of COVID’s toll in India that balanced intimacy and devastation, while offering viewers a heightened sense of place”, according to The Pulitzer Prizes website.
Their work was moved from the breaking news photography category by the judges.
The Pulitzer introduction about Mattoo says: Sanna Irshad Mattoo is a photojournalist and documentary photographer based in Kashmir. Ranging from groundbreaking news to in-depth storytelling, her work concentrates on depicting the tension between the seeming ordinariness of life and the stark symbols of a menacing militarized milieu of Kashmir. Her work has been published in newspapers and magazines around the world and has been screened and exhibited in various exhibitions and festivals. She presently contributes to Reuters as a Multimedia Journalist.
Siddiqui, 38, was on assignment in Afghanistan last year when he died. The award-winning journalist was killed in July last while covering clashes between Afghan troops and the Taliban in Spin Boldak district of Kandahar city.
This is for the second time that Siddiqui has won the Pulitzer Prize. He was honoured with the prestigious award in 2018 as part of the Reuters team for their coverage of the Rohingya crisis. He had extensively covered the Afghanistan conflict, the Hong Kong protests and other major events in Asia, Middle East, and Europe.
Marcus Yam of the Los Angeles Times bagged the award in the Breaking News photography category “for raw and urgent images of the US departure from Afghanistan that capture the human cost of the historic change in the country”.
Win McNamee, Drew Angerer, Spencer Platt, Samuel Corum and Jon Cherry of Getty Images also won the award in the Breaking News photography category for their “comprehensive and consistently riveting photos of the attack on the US Capitol”.
The Washington Post bagged the Pulitzer Prize in public service journalism for its coverage of the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.
The Pulitzer Board awarded a special citation to the journalists of Ukraine for their “courage, endurance, and commitment to truthful reporting during (President) Vladimir Putin’s ruthless invasion of their country and his propaganda war in Russia”.
Reuters photographers Adnan Abidi, Sanna Irshad Mattoo, Amit Dave and Danish Siddiqui.
