Getty's Shaul Schwarz Wins The Robert Capa Gold Medal Award
NEW YORK, NY (April 23, 2009) – Photojournalist Shaul Schwarz of Getty Images has been awarded the Robert Capa Gold Medal from the Overseas Press Club for his work documenting violence in Kenya following the December 2007 presidential election, and Stephanie Sinclair has received the Olivier Rebbot Award for her essay on the tradition of young female circumcision in Muslim culture.
In addition, Agence France-Presse photographers Tony Karuma, Simon Maina, Yasuyoshi Chiba, Walter Astrada, and Roberto Schmidt received the John Faber Award for photographic reporting from abroad for their coverage of the Kenyan election violence, and Patrick Farrell of The Miami Herald won OPC's Feature Photography award for the same body of work that earned him a Pulitzer Prize on Monday, his essay "A People In Distress: Haiti's Year Without Mercy."
The awards were made last night at the OPC's annual dinner in New York.
The Robert Capa Gold Medal award is given by the OPC in recognition of the "best published photographic reporting from abroad, requiring exceptional courage and enterprise." It honors the legacy of the great war photographer Robert Capa of Magnum Photos.
The OPC said that Schwarz's coverage of the election violence in Kenya were testimony to the extraordinary and violent scenes he witnessed and captured, where in two months of bloodshed more than 1,000 people were left dead and as many as half a million people were displaced. The citation said his photographs were "brilliantly composed and impactful" and showed "remarkable poise and focus in making a memorable sequence of images under chaos and pressure," and that his work continues the legacy and spirit of Capa.
"It's such a great honor to receive such a prestigious award with Capa's name on it, it's like a basketball player getting an award with Michael Jordan's name on it," Schwarz told News Photographer magazine.
"It's an award for 'courage' but I think courage is something else," Schwarz said. "Courage is a man walking at night with his family through a war-torn country, or a politician who is trying to make peace. We go out there and we might take some risks, sure, but it seems natural. It's what we do. I feel very fortunate to be able to cover these stories. I can't think of doing anything else. I feel very happy and blessed. I do feel very honored to join such a list of great photographers' names, but I don't feel 'courage.' I feel like it's just hard-core journalism."
Schwarz said it was his first time in Kenya, and that he covered the story "with all my heart."
"It's the local photographers there who were courageous," he said. "You could see the fear in peoples' eyes. I wanted my pictures to capture that fear."
Yuri Kozyrev was the runner-up for this year's Capa honor for his essay "Beyond Bpak."
The Capa award was won last year by John Moore of Getty Images for his coverage of the assassination of Pakistan's former prime minster Benazir Bhutto and his images from the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Jerome Delay of the Associated Press was awarded a citation in the Farber Award category for his essay "Trouble In Congo," and Carol Guzy of The Washington Post received a citation in the Feature Photography category for her essay, "Birth and Death: Maternal Mortality in Sierra Leone," work that was a nominated finalist Monday in the Pulitzer Prizes.
Astrada is also ths year's National Press Photographers Association's 2009 Best Of Photojournalism Photojournalist of the Year (Large Markets).
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