Every year a Columbia University committee awards two Pulitzer prizes to journalists for breaking news photography and feature photography (until 1967, the prize for photography was just one).
This year, the award for breaking news was given to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch photography staff, for “their powerful images of the despair and anger in Ferguson, Missouri.” Alongside the award-winning pictures published in the paper, the staff has shared powerful images of the riots in Ferguson on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Instagram account during the days that followed the killing of Michael Brown:
On the other side of the world, Daniel Berehulak, who won for feature photography, chronicled a very different struggle—that of the Liberian community hit by Ebola. Berehulak maintained a closeness to his subjects, who were dealing with a tragedy of epic proportion. And as it’s the case with the images from Ferguson, social media allows us to look at the making of such poignant images: The photos in Berehulak’s Instagram feed are as powerful as the images he published in the New York Times:
While reporting for long stretches in Monrovia, his images reveal great tenderness and compassion. On both his Instagram and Facebook, Berehulak offered glimpses of the lives of people facing the epidemics—stories such as that of William Beyan, 5, shot here before he died of the disease.