Doug Mills, photographer for the New York Times, and Moises Saman, contributor to the New Yorker, have been named the winners of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in the two photography categories. Mills’s series of photos captured during the assassination attempt on Donald Trump won the Breaking News Photography category while Saman’s photos of the Sednya Prison in Syria took home the award for Feature Photography.
Photographer Moises Saman’s book “Glad Tidings of Benevolence” (GOST, 2023) starts off with this banger of a quote from Walter Benjamin: “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was.’ It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”
Moises Saman’s new book brings together his original imagery with materials and military documents to reflect on the subjective nature of portraying conflict
The photojournalist’s new book brings together his original imagery with materials and military documents to reflect on the subjective nature of portraying conflict
BP maintains it followed “industry practice that is required by federal law.” I would like to see this federal law challenged in court because I have a feeling taking photos of a public street is a constitutionally protected activity.
Moises Saman’s work and words have been featured on Lens 17 times since he was assaulted by tthe police in Tunisia in January. Mr. Saman, who is represented by Magnum Photos, is on assignment for The Times in Libya, where he is in a press pool covering the forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
In July, while working for the New York Times, photographer Moises Saman journeyed into Syria as the first Western photographer to enter the country since the conflict between anti-government protestors and forces of the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad began
The bombing in Damascus “emboldened the rebels to go on the offensive, for a moment suggesting that a perfect storm would lead to the imminent fall of the regime,” Saman wrote to me from his home base in Cairo. “Here we are a month later, with people dying at a rate of about sixty per day, as both sides hunker down and prepare for a long and vicious civil war that will inevitably affect any chance at further reconciliation.”
“In the two years since I moved here, every milestone of the revolution has been marred by an outburst of street violence,” he says. “However, the events of the past week are unprecedented: rocks have been replaced by sniper bullets, city mosques transformed into front line field hospitals, and isolated street clashes superseded by systematized killings.”
Spanish American photographer Moises Saman – a member of Magnum Photos and one of the top photojournalists out there – discusses Discordia, his first self-published photobook made in collaboration with artist Daria Birang
The Magnum photojournalist Moises Saman was in Bangladesh this past week documenting the conditions Rohingya are enduring as they flee, whether wading through the river that marks the border between the two countries, making desperate efforts to obtain food and shelter, or finding dignified ways to bury their dead
Moises Saman: In Discordia, I felt the need to transcend the “news” aspect of the story, and instead work with the slightly more imprecise images that, in my opinion, offer a more nuanced narrative, one that was more in tune with my personal experience in the region
“I was going from one assignment to another, from one revolution to the next, without really seeing the big picture,” says Saman, who now lives in Barcelona, Spain with his fiancée. “I was working one week in Tunisia, the next week in Egypt, and two weeks later I was in Aleppo. I didn’t really have the luxury of much perspective—not that there was necessarily any to be had. The situations were so complex. I just felt the need to sort of slow down and take a look at what I had done.”
in his new book, “Discordia,” which he is self-publishing this month, Saman collects images that convey a more personal and poetic account of his experience in the Middle East. The photographs often capture quiet moments peripheral to the action of a photojournalist: men collecting scrap metal from vehicles burned during the Rabaa massacre, in Cairo; the burial of a fallen fighter in Aleppo
SamanMagnum photographer Moises Saman visited Iraqi Kurdistan, known as “Bashur”, or southern Kurdistan to Kurds, and to Kurdish-controlled parts of northern Syria, collectively known to Kurds as Rojava, or western Kurdistan, to document the latest phase of the Kurds’ battle against the Islamic State
The mines at La Rinconada, a bitter-cold, mercury-contaminated pueblo clinging to the glaciered mountainside, are “artisanal”—small, unregulated, and grossly unsafe. To stave off disaster, the miners propitiate the mountain deities with tiny liquor bottles.
CREDITPHOTOGRAPH BY MOISES SAMAN / MAGNUM
Awarded annually since 1925 “to further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions” the Guggenheim is one of the most prestigious awards of its kind.
