Slain Photo Journalist Danish Siddiqui is one of four Indians to get the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography in 2022, which was revealed late Monday night.
According to the Pulitzer Prize website, Adnan Abidi, Amit Dave, Sanna Irshad Mattoo, and Siddiqui of the Reuters news agency won for “pictures of COVID’s toll in India that combined intimacy with destruction, while affording viewers a heightened feeling of location.”
Abidi, who is based in Delhi, dedicated the prize to Siddiqui, recalling how the epidemic was a “invisible menace” that “no one in the world was prepared for.” His photographs in the Pulitzer package reflected the death and suffering seen during Covid-19, from family members embracing each other in PPE suits to mourn the death of a relative in Delhi in April 2021, to a girl pressing her father’s chest who was having trouble breathing after falling unconscious while receiving oxygen support at a gurudwara in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh.
Abidi began his work as a darkroom assistant in 1997, and this was his third Pulitzer. He was part of the Reuters team that won for coverage of the 2019-20 Hong Kong demonstrations in the breaking news photography category in 2020.
He was also a member of the Reuters team that won the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography in 2018 for photos of the Rohingya refugee crisis, together with Siddiqui.
Siddiqui, 38, was murdered in July 2021 while reporting a conflict between Afghan security forces and Taliban forces in Kandahar’s Spin Boldak area. His images of funeral pyres during the Covid-19 victims’ mass cremations in Delhi last year captured the world’s attention. Danish flew to numerous towns, including Haridwar and Bhagalpur, while the epidemic was rampaging over India, according to his father, Mohammad Akhtar Siddiqui.
Siddiqui’s shot of a Naga sadhu donning a mask before joining the Ganga at the ceremonial shahi snan at the Kumbh Mela in Haridwar in April last year is also included on the Pulitzer website. In another scene, a boy fanned his mother with a handkerchief in the backseat of a car while she receives oxygen in a gurudwara parking lot.
Siddiqui also photographed urns carrying ashes gathered after the funeral rituals of victims, awaiting immersion due to a nationwide lockdown, at a cremation in Delhi in May 2021, during the peak of the pandemic, when many perished alone.
Mattoo, a 28-year-old Magnum Foundation Photography and Social Justice fellow, chronicled the epidemic in Kashmir in 2021. Her shot of a shepherd receiving the Covishield vaccine at Lidderwat in Kashmir’s Anantnag district in June 2021 may be seen on the Pulitzer website.
Dave, 53, from Ahmedabad, got his interest for photography from his father, who also collected cameras. Dave was photography throughout Gujarat in 2021 as the Delta wave of the epidemic struck India, having previously documented the 2002 Gujarat riots and the damage inflicted by the 2004 tsunami in Tamil Nadu for Reuters. A healthcare worker checks the temperature of a woman inside her hut during a coronavirus vaccination push for employees at a brick kiln in Kavitha hamlet on the outskirts of Ahmedabad in April 2021, according to his photograph on the Pulitzer website.
