And that's probably the point of giving the award to this photographer and photo. It captures the horror of guerilla warfare and terrorism in a way that can't help but ram home the message - this is something that has to stop. Hossaini describes the context:
"I was just looking at my camera when suddenly there was a big explosion," he said.
"For a moment I didn't know anything, I just felt the wave of the explosion as a pain inside my body. I fell down on the ground.
"I saw everybody running away from the smoke. I sat up and saw my hand was bleeding but I didn't feel any pain.
"It's my job to know what is going on so I ran in the opposite direction to everybody else," Hossaini continued.
"When the smoke went away I saw I was standing in the centre of a circle of dead bodies.
"They were all together on top of each other. I was standing exactly where the suicide attacker had been."
Hossaini said he was in "shock" and initially "didn't know what to do".
"I just started clicking," he said.
"I know that I was crying. It was really weird crying, I've never reacted like that before.
"I didn't help anybody, because I couldn't, I was really in shock.
"I knew I should cover this, record everything, all the pain, the people running, crying, shouting, beating their chests, shouting: 'Death to Al Qaeda, death to the Taliban!'"
Hossaini said he turned to the right and saw the girl, Tarana, whose age has been given as either 10 or 12.
"When Tarana saw what had happened to her brother, her cousins, uncles, mother, grandmother, the people around her, she was just shouting," he said.
The photo is graphic. Please don't proceed if you think you won't be able to handle it. For this reason, the picture is not reproduced here.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-04-17/afp-photographer-gets-pulitzer/3954142
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please share, "Like", or comment on this post. Feedback is fuel for the blogger!