Best photographic reporting from abroad requiring exceptional courage and enterprise published in any medium
AWARD YEAR: 2022
AWARD NAME: The Robert Capa Gold Medal Award 2022
RECIPIENT: Marcus Yam
AFFILIATION: Los Angeles Times
HONORED WORK: “The First 30 Days of the War in Ukraine”
Marcus Yam unflinchingly captures the devastation of the war in Ukraine with nuance and poetry. His photographic reporting on the cruelty of the conflict is carefully curated, displaying the terrors of human loss and mourning tempered with quiet moments of survival among people who carry on even though their world has been upended. Yam’s is an exceptional example of the power of photography to expand our collective conscience.
See a slide show of the winning images:
A Ukrainian soldier walks down a railway path to scout ahead past the bodies of dead Russian soldiers covered in snow where fighting took place with Russian forces on the northern outskirts of Irpin, Ukraine, Tuesday, March 1, 2022. War was coming. Russian President Vladimir Putin amassed his forces around Ukraine. The world called for peace as winter hardened. Putin expected an easy victory in a march toward Kyiv. But Ukrainian forces and armed civilians battled hard and refused defeat. But on Feb 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, igniting the biggest crisis in Europe since World War II. Photo: Marcus Yam
Oksana Romaschuk, 43, closes her eyes and prays as others start to escape in getaway cars commandeered by volunteers as the sounds of battle between Russian and Ukrainian forces draw closer to their location, to Irpin, Ukraine, Friday, March 4, 2022. Photo: Marcus Yam
Civilians rush to board the last evacuating train as the sounds of battle – gunfire and bombing – indicating that the fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces draw closer to the city of Irpin, Ukraine, Friday, March 4, 2022. It had taken a little over a week for Russia’s war to come to Irpin, a city of some 60,000, transforming what was a charming suburb northwest of the Ukrainian capital into an eerie place of cracked windows, mortar-gouged streets, smoke-darkened skies, grief and dread. Photo: Marcus Yam
A body of a man lay on its side at a park beside a car that crashed into the trees, in Irpin, Ukraine, Saturday, March 12, 2022. The deceased man was killed at point-blank range with wounds to the back of the heads. Photo: Marcus Yam
A couple embraces each other as they ride in a back of transport van driven by Maksim Chepchenko, not pictured, who volunteers his time and commandeer cars to rescue residents without transportation and ferries them to a broken bridge over the Irpin river to evacuate the besiege town of Irpin, Ukraine, Sunday, March 13, 2022. Photo: Marcus Yam
A bridge that crosses the Trubizh River is destroyed, on a road leading to Borshchiv, Ukraine, Friday, March 11, 2022. Photo: Marcus Yam
A hand sliced-off by the knuckles lays on the ground after Russian bombardment targeted a humanitarian aid station, killing and wounding at least dozen civilians in Moskovskyi District in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Friday, March 25, 2022. Photo: Marcus Yam
Julia Romantschenko, 34, leans in to bid farewell to her grandfather, as an unnamed family friend, center, and Liubov Romantschenko, 62, attend the funeral for Boris Romantschenko, in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Thursday, March 24, 2022. Romantschenko survived Hitler’s wrath over Europe, survived forced labor and detention in four concentration camps during World War II. He was killed by Russian bombardment struck his apartment building in Kharkiv. Photo: Marcus Yam
A man and a woman is injured and badly burned after a building that was just hit by bombardment caught on fire, in the Moskovskyi distric in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Friday, March 25, 2022. Photo: Marcus Yam
A Ukrainian military vehicle speeds by on a main road where a fight between Ukrainian and Russian forces came to a destructive end, near Sytnyaky, Ukraine, Thursday, March 3, 2022. The shell that reamed the Russian soldiers’ vehicle scattered them in all directions. One was face down on the asphalt, arms outstretched. Another was a mass of white and red in barely-there fatigues. Heat had singed the skin of the third, and the fourth had been thrown 130 feet, landing in a field by the road, torso mangled, legs twisted backward. The fight had been a three-vehicle group, including an armored personnel carrier and a Ural truck — erupted on E40, an 8,000-mile trans-European highway that threads its way from France’s Calais to Kazakhstan, passing through this spot near a roadside hotel. It’s a 24-mile straight shot to the capital, Kyiv. Photo: Marcus Yam
Andrei Kulik tries to comfort a neighbor’s dog, paralyzed by fear and refuses to move from the middle of the road as Russian bombardment continues to besiege the town of Irpin, Ukraine, Sunday, March 13, 2022. Photo: Marcus Yam
A man hurries to walk away from a building that was just hit by Russian bombardment and caught on fire, in the Moskovskyi district in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Friday, March 25, 2022. Even now, a month into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion, an air of disbelief hovers like smoke. Kharkiv is a largely Russian-speaking city, only 25 miles from the border; one of Putin’s main pretexts for the invasion was that Ukraine’s Russian speakers needed protection. Instead, the city became a prime target, among the first areas in the country to be subjected to large-scale bombing of densely populated civilian neighborhoods, a tactic that is now a dominant component of the Russian military campaign. “It’s not just a war, this is a massacre,” Kharkiv’s mayor, Ihor Terekhov, said on Telegram after Russian forces began savaging the city with missiles and artillery fire. Photo: Marcus Yam
Citation for Excellence:
Adriana Zehbrauskas
The New York Times
“Gang Warfare Cripples Haiti’s Fight Against Cholera”