Opinion Pulitzer to photographers for coverage of India’s Covid tragedy underlines the abiding relevance of the still image

It doesn’t take all that long for tragedy to become fodder for statistics, political one-upmanship and an endless stream of “content”. It was, after all, just about a year ago that India was in the midst of the second wave of the pandemic. The deadly Delta variant effected millions — directly and indirectly — as India’s health infrastructure, like much of the world’s, struggled to cope with the crisis. The public conversation has moved on to statistical models of mortality, to apportioning blame. The Pulitzer Prize to Reuters photographers Adnan Abidi, Sanna Irshad Mattoo, Amit Dave and the late Danish Siddiqui for their images — haunting, tragic and even redemptive — is a reminder of both the scale of the devastation and the human stories that the numbers sometimes obfuscate.

The pictures of mass cremations and graves are a record of the suffering; the photos from the backs of cars, and ambulances of people gasping as panicked loved ones struggle to help them. But the catalogue of images is of more than suffering. From Ahmedabad to Anantnag, Indians got and took the vaccine, which held out the hope back then of a return to a life that goes beyond the fear of the virus. Individually, each image is a moving snapshot of one of the most trying times in India’s recent history. Collectively, they tell the pandemic’s story.

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The Pulitzer for Abidi, Mattoo, Dave and Siddiqui acknowledges what is so often forgotten — the power of a still image. This power is at its most potent when the lens is turned outward, to the world instead of inward, for the selfie. In the age of Instagram, constant CCTV surveillance, a camera on every phone, the visual chroniclers of the pandemic have reminded us exactly why history must also be recorded through a professional lens.

This editorial first appeared in the print edition on May 11, 2022 under the title ‘Seeing the pandemic’.