Photojournalists Guzy, Kahn, Carioti, Davidson, Porter And Kim Win Pulitzer Prizes
By Donald R. Winslow
© 2011 News Photographer magazine
NEW YORK, NY (April 18, 2011) – Carol Guzy, Nikki Kahn, and Ricky Carioti of The Washington Post, and Barbara Davidson of the Los Angeles Times, have been awarded the Pulitzer Prizes for photography today at Columbia University in Manhattan.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel photojournalist Gary Porter is part of a five-person Milwaukee team to win the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for their "lucid examination of an epic effort to use genetic technology to save a 4-year-old boy imperiled by a mysterious disease" told with world, graphics, video, and other images.
And photojournalist John J. Kim of the Chicago Sun-Times was part of a three-person team to win the Pulitzer Prize today for Local Reporting. Kim joined Frank Main and Mark Konkol in winning for their series of stories that documented the violence in Chicago neighborhoods, "probing the lives of victims, criminals and detectives as a widespread code of silence impedes solutions." Kim has been a staff photographer for the Sun-Times since 2004, and previously shot for the Oakland Tribune.
Guzy, Kahn, and Carioti were selected for their Breaking News images that chronicled the destruction and death caused by a January 12, 2010, earthquake in Haiti.
It's Guzy's third Pulitzer Prize for work done at the Post and her fourth Pulitzer Prize overall. Today's win is the first Pulitzer Prize for Kahn and Carioti. Guzy and Kahn are NPPA members.
Davidson, who first joined NPPA in 1997 and won her first Pulitzer Prize in 2006, today won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for her documentation of the victims of a decade or more of gang violence in southern California, In the series her photographs look at those who have been left behind – maimed victims, husbands, mothers, best friends of the dead – the ones who have to live on without forgetting what's happened to their loved ones, as Times journalist Kurt Streeter wrote about the essays.
Davidson's photographs are stark, heartbreaking, beautiful, and captivating in the same way her previous documentary projects – like last year's award-winner "Frozen Land, Forgotten People" – have captured the soul and spirits of her subjects.
She told News Photographer magazine today that she was glad to see the story recognized because the Pulitzer honor supports her ongoing career goal of working on social documentary stories that report on the greater human condition.
The finalists in the Breaking News category were Daniel Berehulak and Paula Bronstein of Getty Images for their coverage of the historic floods in Pakistan, and Carolyn Cole of the Los Angeles Times for her coverage of the massive BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
In the Feature Photography category, the finalists were Todd Heisler of The New York Times for photographs he did as part of a Times series on Alzheimer's Disease, and NPPA member Greg Kahn of The Naples Daily News for his photographic essay on the impact of home foreclosures in south Florida.
The jury for the Pulitzer photography catetories was Nancy Andrews of the Detroit Free Press; Francisco Bernasconni of Getty Images; Colin Crawford of the Los Angeles Times; Richard Murphy of the Anchorage Daily News; and Steve Gonzales of the Houston Chronicle.
This year, for the first time in Pulitzer history, visual journalism was represented on every panel judging every category in the Pulitzer Prizes. Each panel of judges was increased by one judge who was specifically from visual journalism, and the added person had a vote in the finalists that was equal to the vote of all the other panelists. They were there not just to judge the multimedia that may have been part of a written entry, but to judge the writing and editing as well.
It's an important moment in Pulitzer history where photographers, photo editors, and visual journalists were finally and formally treated as equals in the news gathering process.
One Pulitzer panelist this year told News Photographer magazine today that almost every entry this year had photography or multimedia as part of the submission, and that the Pulitzer entry process for Team Entries had been changed from three journalist's names to five so that the submission could include the names of the visual journalists who contributed to these non-photography Pulitzer categories.
An example of a winning entry that benefited from this rule change today was the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's award for the Explanatory Reporting Pulitzer Prize. Five team members who worked on the project were listed on the entry, whereas last year it would have only carried three names. Along with photojournalist Gary Porter, the winning Journal Sentinel team members were Mark Johnson, Kathleen Gallagher, Lou Saldivar, and Alison Sherwood.
Also this year for the first time, the Photography category entries were submitted electronically instead of being required to be entered as prints. The Pulitzer contest made the switch to digital to be more consistent with other major photography contests and to save entrants the expense of costly prints, they said.
Davidson has been a staff photographer at the Los Angeles Times since 2007. A seasoned disaster and conflict photographer, she's covered news around the world including the humanitarian crisis that followed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and uprisings and clashes in Congo, Israel, Gaza and Bosnia. In 2004 she documented the Pacific's tsunami disaster, and in 2008 the Sichuan earthquake in China.
In 2010 her essay "Frozen Land, Forgotten People" won NPPA's Best Of Photojournalism's honor named after the pioneering photojournalist Cliff Edom. The Cliff Edom "New America Award" recognized her for documenting the lives of more than 8,000 Navajo Indians who lived on a 1.6 million acre tract of tribal land in northeastern Arizona where for four decades it was illegal for them to erect or repair homes, build roads, or connect to basic services thanks for a Bureau of Indian Affairs "freeze" on the land.
Before Los Angeles, Davidson worked for The Dallas Morning News, the Washington Times, and The Record in Ontario, Canada. She won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography along with seven fellow Dallas Morning News staff photographers for their photographs that documented the pain and suffering in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. A graduate of Concordia University, she was born and raised in Montreal. In 2006 she was named the Newspaper Photographer of the Year by Pictures of the Year International.
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