Photography Pulitzers Awarded for Coverage of Charlottesville and Rohingya Refugee Crisis

Ryan M. Kelly won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography for his “chilling image” of a car barreling into a crowd of protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia. He took the picture, which The Washington Post said would “define this moment in American history,” on his final assignment on his last day as a staff photographer at The Daily Progress.

Kelly had been covering a white nationalist rally on Aug. 12 when a car plowed into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing one person and injuring 19 others who had been frantically scrambling to get out of his way when they were tossed about in the chaos. In a first-person account for The Columbia Journalism Review, he said he had gone to cover the rally with his editor after weeks of preparation.

“There were groups on both sides scattered,” he wrote. “There were a few small fights that broke out from time to time. People were throwing stuff at each other. A few people were beating on each other. Eventually I came across two large groups of people protesting against the ‘Unite the Right’ rally and they merged together on Water Street.”

He said he walked ahead of the crowd — he estimated there were well over 100 people — when he stopped for a moment.

“I edged over onto the sidewalk to get pictures, and right after I did, the car came screeching past me at speed, plowed into the crowd of protesters and immediately reversed back up the hill,” he wrote. “It turned, then took off. Out of instinct, I began taking photos. I just brought the camera to my eye and just mashed the shutter down. I was barely even aware of what I was watching until he was speeding into the crowd.”

He added that had he had stayed in the middle of the street for 20 more seconds, he probably would have been hit, too. “That was the first thing that went through my head a couple hours after I was done processing images,” he wrote. “I was right where the car went, and I am very fortunate.”

His newspaper’s coverage of the event attested to the role that local news media can play when hometown developments fall under a national spotlight. Aaron Richardson, the editor of The Daily Progress, which has a circulation of 15,000, said the prize was a “great recognition” of the work Ryan and his colleagues had put in over the last year, as they covered protests by the Ku Klux Klan and other white nationalist groups.

“I don’t think you can find a better advertisement for the daily broadsheet than our coverage of the events of last year, to say nothing of our coverage of City Council meetings and all the other less sexy things we do on a daily basis,” he said. “Our journalists worked as hard on any random Tuesday night as they did on Aug. 12.”

Kelly said that while there was no way to prepare for covering an event that would receive international attention, his experience on a small daily newspaper came in handy. “Four years of doing the job every day, you get good at reacting to what’s in front of you,” he said. “So that’s what I did that day in August.”

When the news of the award first broke, Kelly and his wife were on the way back to the United States after attending the World Press Photo awards in Amsterdam. When his plane landed, he turned on his phone and was met with a flood of congratulatory texts and tweets.

“To be a winner myself is still unfathomable right now, it’s really unbelievable,” he said. “I really can’t even wrap my brain around being one of them myself right now.”

Kelly took his Pulitzer Prize-winning image as he prepared to leave the newspaper where he had worked for the last four years. He now works as a digital and social media coordinator for a craft-ale brewery, a dream job for a professed beer geek.

“It was a job at a brewery, which sounded fun,” he told The Columbia Journalism Review. “Also, by virtue of being a photographer at a newspaper with a small staff, I’ve done a lot of social media work. It felt like a natural fit, and the hours are flexible which means I can still continue as a freelance photographer.”

Ivor Prickett, a freelance photographer on assignment for The New York Times, was a finalist in the breaking news photography category for his “heartbreaking and frightening images that brought a fresh approach to classic war photography and gave an intimate view of the impact on shellshocked survivors of what ISIS left behind in Mosul and Raqqa.”

The photography staff of Reuters won the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography for its coverage of the Rohingya refugee crisis.

The team for Reuters’ winning entry consisted of Mohammad Ponir Hossein, Danish Siddiqui, Soe Zeya Tun, Damir Sagolij, Adnan Abidi, Hannah McKay and Cathal McNaughton. The prize jury had originally nominated the Reuters entry in the breaking news category, but the Pulitzer Prize Board moved it to the feature category.

The Reuters photographers put together a quietly gripping set of images, from weary refugees, staggering ashore as they crossed the border from Myanmar into Bangladesh, to an 11-month-old child who died from a high fever in a refugee camp, his eyes covered by two verdant leaves.

Meredith Kohut, a freelance photographer working for The New York Times, was named a finalist in the feature category “for wrenching images from the streets, homes and hospitals of Venezuela, where government policies have resulted in widespread malnutrition and starvation of children.”