Pregled posta

Marketing

2000 Pulitzer Prize, Feature Photography, Carol Guzy, Lucian Perkins and Michael Williamson

By the thousands, they come. Ragged, weary, fleeing the Serbs. A tidal wave of ethnic Albanians trying to cross from Kosovo into Macedonia and Albania. But there are no welcome signs.

Aid workers set up primitive tent camps. There is little food, water and few medical supplies. The refugees, mostly women, children and the elderly, wait in limbo.

Washington Post photographers Carol Guzy, Michael Williamson and Lucian Perkins spend two months in the camps. Interpreters help them understand the plight and despair. "No still picture," Guzy says, "could possibly convey their tears and pain or the hell from which they had come." Yet the photographers capture it as best they can.

Guzy crosses the border at Morina with refugees headed for a transit camp in Kukcs, Albania. Stripped of their possessions, they wait to get in. On either side of the camp fence, members of the Shala family unite. They pass 2-year-old Akim Shala through the fence. Guzys camera captures the baby sliding through the barbed wire into the hands of his loving grandparents.

Perkins and an estimated 70,000 refugees are near Macedonia in a no mans land called Blace. There is no shelter. Disease is spreading. Families try to get out. But border guards allow only a trickle of refugees to leave. Cameras swinging from his neck, Perkins hides behind a truck and slips past camp guards. He photographs sorrow and desperation.

Williamson is in Velika Krusa, Kosovo, covering the havoc wrought by Serbs. In a burned-out house, Qamil Duraku sits on a bucket, looks up and says, "You’re here. You finally came." The man thinks the photographer is a war crimes investigator there to document the deaths of his cousins. In each hand he holds pieces of his relatives, body parts the Serbs had torched. He cries, "Why did they do this? Why?" Williamson tries to comfort Duraku. He can’t. He takes his photograph.

2001 Pulitzer Prize, Spot News Photography, Alan Diaz, Associated Press

It's dawn in Miami's Little Havana. Photographers and reporters doze on lawn chairs. Demonstrators mill about after in all-night vigil. Inside the house, a family lawyer negotiates by phone with U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno. On the sofa sleeps 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez.

Associated Press photographer Alan Diaz stands at the backyard fence. For five months from this spot. Diaz has covered the international custody war between the child's cousins in Miami and father in Cuba. Diaz has lived in Cuba and speaks Spanish. The relatives let him take pictures. But he must stay outside the fence. And he must never, ever speak to Elian.

At 5 a.m. on April 22. 2000, rumors swirl: a temporary accord may allow a visit with the boys lather. The rumors prove untrue. All at once Diaz hears heavy boots stampede the backyard. He grabs his camera, jumps the fence. A family friend lets him in the front door and locks it. Federal agents smash through the house. Diaz sees the relatives scream, mouths moving but bodies frozen.

"Where's the boy?" Diaz shouts. Someone shoves him into the bedroom. Donato Dalrymple, who plucked Elian from the sea, is trying to hide the boy. "What's happening?" Elian asks. "What's happening?" For the first time, Diaz speaks to Elian, tries to calm him down. Then agents kick open the door. One points a 9 mm submachine gun. Diaz takes the picture: a terrified child being seized by the federal government. The lightning move by federal agents takes just 154 seconds.

Even today, long after the court rulings have sent Elian back to Cuba with his father, one thing remains a mystery to photographer Diaz. He can’t figure out how he jumped the fence. "It may have been my pulsing adrenaline." he says. "But then again, I guess it was part of what I always do—I shoot pictures."