Barbara Davidson of the Los Angeles Times has been awarded the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Photography for her story on innocent victims of gang violence. Carol Guzy, Nikki Kahn and Ricky Carioti of the Washington Post were awarded the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News Photography for their images of the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti. The Pulitzers were announced today at Columbia University in New York.

Both prizes come with a $10,000 award; the Washington Post photographers will share their $10,000 prize.

Finalists in both photo categories were also announced today. They include photographers with The New York Times, the Naples (Florida) Daily, Getty Images and the Los Angeles Times.

More information on the Pulitzer prizes in photography, including the list of finalists and the members of the jury, can be found on PDNOnline.com.

After the January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti, seven young artists, including photographers Kareem Black and Wyatt Gallery, formed an art collective they called Le Set (Creole for “seven”) and volunteered with healinghaiti.org. They have continued to use their work to raise money for the healinghaiti.org and to inspire others to help. They call their initiative “Hey You: A Project for Haiti” because “hey you” is what they heard from children wherever they went in Haiti.

Filmmaker Eugene Fuller, a member of Le Set, has created a film about the collective’s trip to Haiti. Here’s a trailer,. The full video was shown at a fundraiser held at the Mother agency in New York last week. You can see it, and learn more about Hey You Haiti, on the project’s web site.

When Pictures of the Year International announced that its 2011 Multimedia Portfolio Prize was won by Leslye Davis, a student at Western Kentucky University, we were initially surprised. Then we saw Davis’s intimate, sensitively produced videos.

In “Leaving Without Absence,” which she produced for the Mountain Workshops in Elizabethtown, Kentucky where her coach was Liz O. Baylen of the LA Times, Davis observes Chris Jensen, preparing for his fourth deployment, and the young son he leaves behind.

Davis has also created videos on  a high school football team’s relationship to their coach, a young man who survived a suicide attempt, and the self-described “contrariest postman you’ve ever met.”  These videos are all available for viewing on Vimeo.

Related article:

Student Wins Multimedia Portfolio Prize at POYi

Syrian authorities have released Reuters photographer Khaled al-Hariri, who had been missing since Sunday March 27, Reuters reports.

Al-Hariri, a Syrian who has worked for the Reuters for more than 20 years, was on his way to work at the Damascus office of the agency when a witness saw him stopped by two men who then lead him away.  A Syrian official told the agency last week he would be released “if there was no evidence against him.”

“Reuters is relieved that Khaled al-Hariri has been released,” Reuters editor-in-chief Stephen Adler said in a statement issued on Monday. “Thankfully he has now safely returned home to his family.”

Al-Hariri is one of several journalists who have been detained in the past week and a half in Syria, where protesters have taken to the streets to demonstrate against President Bashar al-Assad.  Two Lebanese television journalist and a Jordanian reporter were held for two to three days and then deported.  Another Jordanian reporter with Reuters was immediately expelled from the country without being detained. The AP has reported that two of its journalists were ordered out of Syria with less than an hour’s notice.

Adam Dean, a Beijing-based photojournalist represented by Panos Pictures, arrived in Japan roughly 20 hours after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that struck the northeastern coast of the country.  After he returned  home to Beijing  on March 26, Dean (one of the 2011 PDN 30 emerging photographers) answered our questions about the logistical challenges of covering the catastrophe, and also wrote about the story’s emotional impact. We reprint his email to PDN below.

(Some of Dean’s images from Iwate and Myagi Prefectures can be seen on The New Yorker’s Photo Booth blog, and were printed in last week’s issue of the magazine.)

Dean writes:

“I was traveling and working with a British writer from The Daily Telegraph newspaper,  and between us we have covered earthquakes in China, Pakistan and Indonesia, cyclones in Burma and tsunamis in Thailand, India and Sri Lanka, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as undercover reporting trips to North Korea and Burma but from a logistical point of view this has been one of the hardest assignments to cover.

“When we first arrived it was almost impossible to find a car available to hire and a fixer or translator who was prepared to travel north. In Japan, obviously a wealthy country, it is much harder to find an English speaker who has the financial motivation to come and work in a potentially dangerous environment with journalists compared to poorer countries …. Japan is also a deeply rules-based society so therefore the ‘work-arounds’ that journalists might normally use when covering a story like this are less effective here.

“When we first arrived in Tokyo about 20 hours after the tsunami, we were hearing reports of water shortages up north so we bought up as much food and water as we could find in stores in Tokyo where many of the shelves were already beginning to empty.  In the first 36 hours most of the flights and trains north from Tokyo were canceled, all the highways were closed to all but emergency vehicles and as a result the minor roads were clogged with traffic. The other real supply issue was fuel. Some of the oil refineries were damaged in the earthquake so there has been a shortage of fuel which has been compounded by residents fleeing from areas affected by the nuclear reactor leaks who have been constantly topping up on fuel fearing a meltdown. Over a week after the earthquake, there were queues of up to seven hours for fuel in some areas.

“Communications has also been a problem in the tsunami-affected areas where the network infrastructure has been badly damaged but generally it is not too bad. I hired local mobile phones and 3G data cards on arrival at the airport which allows us to be online in most areas and I have a satellite phone and a BGAN for transmitting images when conventional networks are down.

“Once on the ground,  the access has not been a problem. Soldiers, police and other officials have been very helpful in allowing us to work. The real problem has been a logistical and supply issue and access to the remote areas that were affected by the tsunami.

“The catastrophic tsunami was sadly eclipsed by the potential threat of a nuclear meltdown so I have been covering both angles of this story. Once we had sorted out the logistics after our arrival, we headed north to Sendai and stopped on the way in Fukushima at some of the evacuation centers for people living in the exclusion zone close to the failed nuclear reactors. Since then we have been working our way up the tsunami devastated northeast coast in the Myagi and Iwate provinces.

“Covering stories like this is always harrowing. You are photographing people on what is likely to be the worse day of their lives. Many whom I met had lost everything; family, home, savings etc and were now living in cold temporary evacuation centers with little to eat and no idea what or how they would recover their lives. Despite this, without exception all the people that I talked to and photographed in Japan were kind, gracious, generous and optimistic. There was very little complaining or even criticism of the government response.”

Photo © Adam Dean/Panos. Dean’s March 15 image of rescue workers piling bodies onto a truck in Rikuzen-Takaata, Japan, was recently published in The New Yorker.

Two photojournalists, Joe Raedle of Getty Images and Roberto Schmidt of Agence France-Presse, and reporter Dave Clark of AFP have been missing in Libya since Saturday, AFP reported Sunday. Clark and Schmidt told editors via email they were working with Raedle in the eastern Libyan city of Tobruk and were planning to meet with opponents of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi and refugees fleeing the fighting. They were last heard from Saturday.

Today The New York Times reports that four of its journalists missing since Tuesday, including photographers Lynsey Addario and Tyler Hicks, have been released by Libyan authorities.  The four Times journalists, who had entered the country without visas, were arrested while covering the fighting in the eastern Libyan city of Ajdabiya. In a memo to staff, Times editor Bill Keller said the paper waited until the four journalists were safely out of Libya before announcing the news. In today’s   statement, The New York Times says, “We are grateful that our journalists have been released, and we are working to reunite them with their families.  We have been told they are in good health and are in the process of confirming that.”

Several other journalists, however, are believed be held in Libyan custody.  On Saturday,  four journalists with the Al Jazeeera network were detained by Libyan government. A TV cameraperson for the network was killed over the weekend amidst heavy fighting near the rebel-controlled city of Benghazi.

Senior Libyan officials have warned US diplomats that foreign journalists entering the country without visas to cover the rebellion would be considered Al Qaeda collaborators, the AP reports. The US State Department has advised media organizations against sending more journalists into Libya.

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Libya Says It Will Release Times Journalists Today

Lynsey Addario, Tyler Hicks Missing in Libya

Photographers Lynsey Addario and Tyler Hicks are among four New York Times journalists missing in Libya, The New York Times reported today. Also missing are reporter and videographer Stephen Farrell and Beirut bureau chief Anthony Shadid.

According to a statement from the Times, editors last had contact with the journalists on Tuesday when they were in the port city of Ajdabiya. The city is currently held by anti-government rebels who yesterday were preparing for a counter attack by Libyan government forces , the AP reported.

Bill Keller, editor of The New York Times, said in a statement, ““We have talked with officials of the Libyan government in Tripoli, and they tell us they are attempting to ascertain the whereabouts of our journalists.” He added, “We are grateful to the Libyan government for their assurance that if our journalists were captured they would be released promptly and unharmed.” The Times also said there were unconfirmed reports that the journalists may have been swept up by advancing government forces.

Times foreign editor Susan Chira said the paper has a system for tracking the whereabouts of its journalists in war zones, and expects them to call in several times a day. Other journalists covering the rebellion in Libya have been detained by the government. The BBC is reporting that  journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad with The Guardian newspaper in England, who had been held in Libyan custody since March 2,  was released today and is now safely out of the country.

Both Hicks and Addario have extensive experience covering conflict zones.  Addario, who is based in New Delhi, has covered Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Darfur for the Times, Time, National Geographic and other clients. She was the winner of a MacArthur Fellowship in 2009.

Tyler Hicks, who is based in Istanbul, began shooting for the Times in 1999 and has been a staff photographer since 2002. He has covered Chechnya, Afghanistan, Iraq and the recent uprisings in Cairo for the paper.  He was named Newspaper Photographer of the Year in 2007 by Pictures of the Y ear International (POYi).  In an interview with The New York Times Lens blog published March 9, he described the fighting he had seen in Res Lanuf, Libya as the “thickest fighting in a single day” he had ever witnessed.

A Times spokesperson says the journalists’ families were alerted before the Times released its statement to the public.

(Photo: Hicks photographed Libyan rebels pushing towards Res Lanuf on March 9. Photo © Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

The Arizona Republic is reporting that Tucson photographer Jon Wolf and his attorney, Ed Greenberg of New York, demanded $125,000 from the newspaper’s owner for unauthorized use of Wolf’s image of Chrstina-Taylor Green.

Green was the nine-year-old girl killed in Tucson on January 8 when a gunman opened fire on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords at a supermarket. Numerous media outlets, including The Arizona Republic, published Wolf’s portraits of Green without permission.

An attorney for Gannett Co., which owns The Arizona Republic,  says in the newspaper’s report that Gannett “respects intellectual property” and will pay a “standard licensing fee” for its use of the photo. The Gannett attorney doesn’t specify what that fee will be, but says it will be “far shy” of $125,000.

Wolf and Greenberg have been taking a beating in the Tucson media for their efforts to collect fees from media outlets all over the country that used Wolf’s image without permission.

A week ago, Greenberg told PDN he believed that the unauthorized use of Wolf’s images by media outlets around the country was “the most expansive infringement of a photographer’s copyright in history by far.” He was poised to file suit in federal court on Wolf’s behalf to force the Associated Press, The New York Times, AOL, The Wall Street Journal and a number of other media outlets to pay up. But in the face of harsh criticism–including a public dressing down from Christina-Taylor Green’s family–Wolf announced on his blog earlier this week that he wouldn’t file suit just yet.

Wolf is feeling the backlash on Facebook. More than 1,200 people have endorsed a call on the social networking site for a boycott of his business.

Tucson’s ABC affiliate, KGUN, has aired several reports which have helped stoke public sentiment against Wolf and Greenberg. The station has described Greenberg as the New York attorney Wolf hired “to shake money out of some media outlets.”

The station has also depicted Greenberg and Wolf as being in a rush to profit from the photo by registering copyright the first business day after the shootings took place, and by getting the Green family to sign a release on that same day to license the photo to the media.

Related story: Public Outcry Stalls Lawsuit Over Portraits of Tucson Shooting Victim

Public criticism and a stinging statement from the family of a nine-year-old girl killed during the shootings in Tucson last month have led a portrait photographer to halt a copyright lawsuit–at least for now–against various media outlets. The photographer has also apologized to the girl’s family, and blamed the news media for “mischaracteriz[ing]” his intentions. (more…)

South African-born photographer Jodi Bieber has won the 2011 World Press Photo of the Year for her portrait of an Afghan woman attacked and disfigured by her husband. The winners of the 54th annual World Press Photo Contest were announced February 11 in Amsterdam.

The photo  shows 18-year-old Bibi Aisha, who had her nose and ears cut off in retaliation for trying to flee her abusive husband. It appeared on the June 29 cover of TIME magazine with the headline, “What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan.”

For more on Bieber’s prize, and several 1st place winners in the World Press Photo’s nine categories (plus a special prize for photos by Chilean miner Edison Pena), see the news story on PDNOnline.com.