Pulitzer Prizes Announced Later Today
By Donald R. Winslow
© 2011 News Photographer magazine
NEW YORK, NY (April 18, 2011) – The Pulitzer Prizes for journalism will be announced this afternoon at Columbia University in New York at 3 p.m. eastern time, and NPPA and News Photographer magazine will be watching for the photography winners and reporting the announcement live.
The winners and nominated finalists are not announced in advance, but over the weekend there's been the usual speculation about images and photography projects from last year that may be contenders for Pulitzer honors.
Of course there are "dark horse" images that may seemingly come out of nowhere to win, but one way to guess at what some of the top contender photographs may be is to look back at work that's already either won significant recognition or received major play in the media during last year's big stories.
The other caveat, of course, is that the photographs had to be actually entered in the contest to win. Many great news photographs over the years didn't win Pulitzers simply because they weren't submitted to the competition.
Among the images frequently mentioned by many photography editors who were informally polled by News Photographer magazine in the past few days, the photographs Andrees Latif of Reuters made when he covered last year's flooding in Pakistan consistently gain attention. The essay is remarkable, and the lead image of disaster-striken flood victims reaching skyward to cling to a rescue helicopter skid is a classic and iconic news picture.
Latif's Pakistan photographs have already been honored with an ICP Infinity Award, and his portfolio including this story led to him being selected as the Pictures of the Year International Photographer of the Year (Freelance). Latif is also a 2008 Pulitzer winner for breaking news.
There are three significant collections of images by photographers who covered the disastrous aftermath of Haiti's earthquake last year, and it will be interesting to watch whether one of those essays rises above the others, or if the three somehow hinder each other by being about the same story topic.
The three Haiti essays consistently mentioned by photo editors are those by Carlos Barria of Reuters, Damon Winter of The New York Times, and Haitian photographer Daniel Morel (who had the exclusive photographs taken within minutes in Haiti's streets following the quake).
Winter's essay on the Haitian earthquake was part of the portfolio that led to him being selected as the Pictures of the Year International Photographer of the Year (Newspapers).
Judges earlier this year in both the New York Press Photographers Association's annual contest and the White House News Photographers Association's contest "saw a lot of Haiti" in both competitions, and one inside observer commented that "the editing killed a lot of potential winners." It will be interesting to see if the editing changed and if some of those essays made it to the Pulitzer finalist stages.
"Victims Of Gang Violence: Caught In The Crossfire" by Barbara Davidson of the Los Angeles Times is consistently mentioned by photo editors when speculating on this year's Pulitzers. Documenting the victims of a decade or more of gang violence in southern California, the series looks 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 in the series. 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. Davidson won NPPA's "Cliff Edom's 'New America Award'" last year for "Frozen Land."
Photographic news projects that involved entire photography staffs last year that gained recognition includes the coverage of the BP oil spill by the Associated Press as well as by the photo staff of the Times-Picayune in New Orleans.
Other pictures that have already gained merit include one of Daniel Morel's images from moments after Haiti's earthquake that finished second place in Spot News in World Press Photo, and his Haiti quake essay finished first place in the World Press Spot News Stories category.
And who knows? Lurking out there may be some great, single-image Spot News photograph that we haven't really seen in global distribution that was shot by a staff photographer on a daily newspaper that came and went, for whatever reason, without much hoopla. Images like Mary Chind's river rescue and firefighter Ron Olshwanger's dramatic fire photograph remind us that from hyper-local daily news events in towns small and large, photographers capture iconic images from routine news stories that rival any major project done by the world's largest media organizations.
But as Pulitzer Prize-winner Sydney H. Schanberg told News Photographer this weekend, it's just hard to guess what the judges will pick from a year that was "a tumultuous stew of wars, economic chaos, and the toxic political dysfunctionality of Washington. We may see awards going not to the biggies, but to Internet news sites, non-profit investigative enterprises, and regional papers that are often overlooked. Either way, we'll know on Monday."
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