Yam, BS ’06, was honored for his “raw, urgent images” of U.S. departure from Kabul final summer months
BUFFALO, N.Y. — College at Buffalo alumnus and Los Angeles Instances roving foreign correspondent and photojournalist Marcus Yam has won the Pulitzer Prize — his third — for breaking news photography. The Pulitzer Prize winners were being introduced previously this 7 days, honoring the finest in U.S. journalism.
Yam, BS ’06, who shared the award for breaking news photography with four photographers from Getty Photos, was honored for his “raw and urgent photos of the U.S. departure from Afghanistan that capture the human cost of the historic transform in the state.”
A Los Angeles Instances story reporting on Yam’s Pulitzer phone calls Yam a “journalist with a warrior’s bravery and a poet’s coronary heart.”
Yam shipped shots of unspeakable tragedy and abiding emotion regardless of a manhandling by a single of the insurgents, the in the vicinity of-regular menace of other fighters and the considerable technical hurdles of transmitting visuals out of a war zone, the story notes.
In a new job interview with At Buffalo, UB’s alumni journal, Yam recalled his terrifying come across with a Taliban fighter even though documenting the Afghanistan crisis. “If he factors his gun at me, I’m dead,” he stated.
Patrick Shortly-Shiong, proprietor and government chairman of The Los Angeles Times, advised newspaper staffers in a videoconference how very pleased and terrified he was past summer as he adopted Yam’s harrowing coverage in Afghanistan.
“You were being out there doing wonderful things,” Soon-Shiong said. “What you’ve finished, with the images and the pictures, was so critical for the planet. The term ‘genocide’ really needs to be claimed. And your pictorial truly delivers it dwelling. It’s seriously crucial.”
Times’ Govt Editor Kevin Merida also praised Yam, expressing, “We are happy of Marcus Yam for the uncooked ability and humanity of his photojournalism in Afghanistan.”
Born and lifted in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Yam came to UB to examine aerospace engineering and remaining besotted by photojournalism. Yam, who labored on the staff of the UB student newspaper The Spectrum, realized early on in his internship with The Buffalo News for the duration of his senior yr that photography was his accurate calling. He finally landed stints with The Involved Press, The Washington Post, The New York Situations and The Seattle Situations just before becoming a member of the LA Situations.
He spoke previously about how his engineering history performs a part in his technique to photojournalism. “It seriously informs my operate,” he explained. “I consider a extremely analytical and technical method to every little thing that I shoot.”
“Marcus was a wonderful, one of a kind scholar,” Kemper Lewis, dean of UB’s College of Engineering and Used Sciences, explained to At Buffalo. “I noticed him in course 1 working day with a digital camera all over his neck and asked him about it. Photography was obviously a enthusiasm he made a ton of time for, which told me he was disciplined — most engineering learners are overcome by just their research on your own.”
Yam was awarded a 2015 Pulitzer Prize for his job in The Seattle Times’ protection of a horrific mudslide that killed 43 folks in rural Washington. He was also section of the Pulitzer Prize-profitable breaking news group that covered the San Bernardino, California, terrorist attacks in 2015 for the LA Occasions.
