This curation celebrates photojournalistic work published between December 2022 and November 2023. The featured images come from talented and dedicated photographer grantees and reporting partners within the Pulitzer Center network. Their work exposes us to underreported stories from all around the globe. This reporting contributes to strengthening communities, developing solutions, and engaging us to take part in the victories and challenges present in our ever-changing world.
Tulalip Tribe Chairwoman Teri Gobin is shown on the Tulalip Reservation. Gobin says she doesn't think the American public “is ready to admit what their ancestors did." She adds, “There’s still a lot of healing that needs to happen.” In 1819, the federal government instituted a program of state-sponsored abductions and forced assimilation of Native American children, who were sent to boarding schools.
Homem faz vigilância na Terra Indígena Paraná. O povo indígena Panará foi reassentado em sua terra original há 25 anos e, embora sua população esteja aumentando, eles ainda enfrentam a pressão dos invasores.
A man keeps watch on Panará Indigenous land. The Panará Indigenous people resettled on their original land 25 years ago, and while their population is increasing, they still face pressure from invaders.
Didi Juruna bathes in the Xingu River, near where he and other Indigenous river monitors and researchers have camped for the night. Indigenous people are working together with researchers to track the impact of the Belo Monte hydroelectric project on fisheries in Brazil’s Xingu River.
Pamela sleeps in the same bed where she was stabbed. She believes her mother's soul saved her that night. An uncalculated number of LGBTQ people were persecuted, tortured, and executed in the Peruvian jungle by subversive groups during a time of violence that plagued the country from 1980 to 2000. More than two decades later, the nation’s government has yet to document these events to understand the scope of the hatred.
Najwa Kassar and her husband Hussein have six children. Hussein has been without work for over two years, and they can no longer afford enough power to keep their refrigerator running. The stress of poverty has led mothers and fathers in Lebanon to make the heart-wrenching decision of taking their children to orphanages as the nation’s economy collapses.
A young boy (name withheld) plays with his toys during a power outage. He lives with his adoptive parent and her family. Child-caring agencies struggle to find families for children in the Philippines due to "negative beliefs about adoption."
Aradia LaFay performs at Safe Space Cumberland in Cumberland, Maryland, a small Appalachian town with a thriving drag scene. “I started to accept more of my homosexual side when I was in the army,” says LaFay.
Nelita Campos and her parrot. She’s encouraging the children in her village to learn at least a little Iskonawa. Campos, an Iskonawa woman in Ucayali, Peru, is the last lucid speaker of the Iskonawa language.
"When a language dies, a culture that made our planet a diverse and precious place also dies. When we talk about linguistics, many theories emerge about how language is born from our perception of the world and how it is linked to our way of thinking.
Iskonawa words have an origin in the Iskonawa thinking and the cognitive relationship with the biodiversity—and we will never know the mysteries of this ancient culture deeply rooted in the forest. This is the impact of portraying this story about a language on the verge of disappearing: languages are essential to communicate but also to understand other worlds."
Florence Goupil
Chief Sai Fang in his home in Koh Cheu Teal Touch village. His two granddaughters traveled to Thailand early last year in search of domestic work. As fisheries collapse in the area, many young people are leaving to find alternative ways of making a living.
Thangamma, about 80 years old, gathers seaweed off Pananthoppu beach, Pamban island, Tamil Nadu, India. Seaweed extracts are used in a booming global food industry. An estimated 5,000 women gather seaweed in the shallow reefs around Pamban island, which they sell to local factories.
Christian Duarte makes a brief stop in the capital's Sajonia neighborhood to hydrate at 7pm. Delivery drivers work eight to 12 hours a day, even 14. Much of that time they are exposed to heat that is considered a high health risk.
Sumitra Devi wipes a tear as she narrates how female sugarcane workers migrate every year and face sexual harassment in fields during sugarcane-cutting seasons. In India's sugar industry, women work up to 18 hours a day, without access to health or sanitation facilities.
"The Human Cost of Sugar opened my eyes to pay more attention, not just as a filmmaker but also as a woman. Looking at girls with sindoors in their foreheads, girls who are never supposed to become women this soon, hysterectomies of mass villages, and generations of exploitation; I can not have a Kit Kat bar without visualizing their dejected faces."
Meenal Upreti
La deforestación de grandes áreas en la Amazonía, como las que ocupan los menonitas, ha sido posible gracias a que han sabido aprovechar la legislación peruana. El Ministerio Público de Perú está investigando a los menonitas por deforestación y posibles vínculos con el tráfico de tierras.
Mennonites and thousands of colonists take advantage of loopholes and confusion in agrarian laws to deforest large areas in the Amazon rainforest. The Public Ministry of Peru is investigating Mennonites for deforestation and potential links to land trafficking.
Artisanal gold mining in the mountains of southern Peru has brought riches, but also conflict. In the last three years, 20 miners have been killed and another 65 have died due to work-related accidents or landslides in the Arequipa region. Despite the difficulties, informal or illegal artisanal miners do not abandon their work for their families.
"Esta historia implicó convivir con los mineros informales. Algunos son evasivos, pero otros quieren mostrar que solo buscan trabajar para mantener a sus familias. La actividad involucra a padres, esposas y hasta hijos, quienes arriesgan sus vidas, pues se exponen a accidentes laborales y ataques armados de otros grupos de mineros.
En un enfrentamiento, ocurrido unos días antes de llegar a la zona, dos hombres perdieron los brazos luego de recibir descargas de dinamita y otros más fueron gravemente heridos. Las autoridades peruanas de justicia y de fiscalización brillan por su ausencia."
"This story involved living with informal miners. Some are evasive, but others want to show that they are only looking to work to support their families. The activity involves parents, wives and even children, who risk their lives, as they are exposed to work accidents and armed attacks by other groups of miners.
In a confrontation, which occurred a few days before arriving in the area, two men lost their arms after receiving dynamite blasts and others were seriously injured. The Peruvian justice and oversight authorities are conspicuous by their absence."
Roberth Orihuela
Efrén Lepe and Rosalía Medina, parents to 32-year-old César Lepe, have tried multiple types of masks to minimize the risk of their son being reinfected with COVID-19. Despite the family’s efforts, César has been infected at least four times.
Maruti Bondre, 70, feeds lunch to his wife Chandrakala, at the hostel for leprosy patients and for leprosy-cured rehabilitated persons, in the village Anandwan.
Five Indigenous doulas make up Hummingbird Indigenous Family Services, a Seattle-based organization that provides cultural-specific care to pregnant women and their babies in the first thousand days of their baby’s life.
Judith Surber with her grandchildren on the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation. The opioid crisis facing the nation has infiltrated the community, causing destruction and havoc along its path, leaving families like hers shattered.
"The story is a moment of redemption for Judy. She has received so much vitriol from people who have said she enables her adult children and blames her for their addiction.
What they don’t understand is that the true consequences of a tough-love approach, compounded by a history of colonization, can perpetuate harm for Native Families. She did not want to be one more voice telling her children they are not lovable or worthy. The choice for Judy is between seeing her children die alone on the street or continuing to love them through their journey. She chooses love every time.
Her two young grandchildren, whom she raised since they were babies, have been taken away from her because the stigma so often painted across people navigating addiction also adheres to those close to them. We both hope this story will be a catalyst to get them back. It's a rare thing to have someone facing the fentanyl crisis get the opportunity to tell their own story!"
Justin Maxon
Grandfather Camilo Ramos Manuel, a 66-year-old traditional Tikuna doctor, prepares to examine a pregnant woman and ask for a good path for the baby. “The shamans see," says Ramos. "They know how to see the spirits, to remove the bad spirits from the body." Indigenous communities in the region have higher-than-average suicide rates, the most alarming symptom of a wide-ranging mental health crisis.
Krzysztof Sowinski sits on his couch where his late wife, Marta, rested in the days before she died. Over a year after Marta’s death, Krzysztof has not moved anything from this couch or his display of ultrasound photos and other items. It is likely, reproductive-rights advocates say, that many women who die from pregnancy complications would be alive if not for Poland's restrictive abortion laws.
Researcher Eric Bastos Gorgens pilots a drone. Gorgens and his crew of six researchers spent days trekking through dense, dangerous forest to find and document the tallest known tree in the Amazon.
Roxane Boonstra examines a “tree” of healthy elkhorn coral at Coral Restoration Foundation’s Tavernier nursery, the world’s largest coral nursery in the ocean. The summer’s extreme marine heat waves caused a mass bleaching event in the Florida Keys, a reef area which had already declined by 90 percent due to past heat waves.
"Hauntingly beautiful bleached elkhorn corals (Acropora palmata) stand like ghosts on a Florida reef. Going back to Florida felt like seeing an old friend but I wished it was under happier circumstances. I've spent the past year in California but lived the better part of a decade living in Florida. This was a emotionally difficult story to photograph in my home waters—seeing the stark, white corals takes your breath away and brings tears to your eyes."
Jennifer Adler
Sheep are transported on a boat in the upper Narsaq fjords, en route to a nearby slaughterhouse. “Greenland is probably the only place in the world where meat is cheaper than lettuce or vegetables,” says greenhouse founder Rasmus Damsgaard Jakobsen. The country is also unique in viewing climate change as a positive prospect.
To power their bitcoin mines in Ekibastuz, crypto construction company BTC.kz shipped in huge transformers and kilometers of high tension cable. Bitcoin miners flocked to Kazakhstan to take advantage of cheap energy and loose regulation. Now most of them have moved on, leaving little behind but moldering equipment and social tension.
"I went to northeast Kazakhstan to try to capture the physical imprint of the cryptocurrency industry. It’s a rugged place, with livid scars from heavy industry—the perfect place to show the weird contrast between the ephemeral digital world and the infrastructure needed to keep it going.
What you find in Ekibastuz and Temirtau—smut-stained streets, belching coal plants and corruption, is as much the story of crypto as the Bahamian luxury lifestyles of the industry’s disgraced wunderkind, Sam Bankman-Fried."
Peter Guest
Marine biologist Gabriel Renato Castro, on the land where he built his laboratory of tank photobioreactors. The project, which aims to enhance temperature resistance and strengthen root growth in plants, could help Chile’s lucrative avocado farms reduce their high water consumption and environmental burden.
Dave Eubank (center, in hat) leads trainees through a pushup session as part of a “Ranger Run” they must complete to graduate. Eubank, a former U.S. Special Forces officer and ordained Christian minister, started the Free Burma Rangers (FBR) to provide medical care and aid to people resisting the Southeast Asian nation’s military junta. In an unusual arrangement, FBR and ethnic resistance groups cooperate, drill, and work out side by side under Eubank’s direction.
Qaali Dahir Mohamed, 18, shows a picture of her nephew Mohamed Shilow Muse, far right, on her cellphone. The Intercept published a Pentagon investigation of civilian deaths from a U.S. drone strike in Somalia. Qaali’s sister, Luul, and niece, Mariam, were killed in the attack.
After floodwaters displaced thousands, families in Saint-Louis, Senegal, fled to an inland displacement camp. Saint-Louis is wrestling with the effects of a rapidly warming planet.
Actor Nabi Attai, 74, in Kabul. When the Taliban banned movies, Nabi Attai had nothing to fall back on. In his 70s, the actor is now destitute. Using images from a wooden box camera, Associated Press photographer Rodrigo Abd chronicled how people’s lives changed in Afghanistan two years after the Taliban’s return.
Sead Đulić, a theater director and head of the national Association of Anti-Fascists, paints over derogatory graffiti about Tito, the leader of Yugoslavia from 1945 to 1980. The most significant anti-fascist architectural landmark in the former Yugoslavia has been neglected and left as a ruin for decades. Having survived the 1990s Bosnian war, the Partisan Memorial Cemetery in Mostar now faces its biggest threat—and possible disappearance—as organized neo-fascists are intent on destroying the necropolis and all it stands for.
Linda poses for a portrait at her home in California on June 18, 2023. She is renting a room in a house that she shares with her three sons. Linda was forced to leave her home in Ixtaro, Michoacán, Mexico, in 2021 as she and her children fled a cartel that took control of her town.
"Our goal wasn't just to draw readers into the story's violence, but to capture the strengths of this community—their resilience, their pride in their labor, and the bittersweet joy that coexists with fear.
The process was demanding. Protecting the identity of Linda and her family, who fled violence to seek asylum in the US, meant relying solely on evocative imagery to bridge the gap. But through these photographs we aimed to bring listeners closer to Linda and her family, to feel the beauty of their hometown and the chilling touch of loss that drove them away.
By amplifying Linda's story, we hoped to shed light on the complexities of Michoacán, a land where verdant life thrives alongside the scars of violence. It's a story that deserves to be heard, not just for its tragedy, but for the strength and resilience of its people."
Stephania Corpi
reporting partner to Toya Sarno Jordan
Gang killings are rife in Serbia. Mara Halabrin Melikova lost her son, whose portrait hangs in her Belgrade apartment, in a killing that remains unsolved.
Bauxite, a mined material with high concentrations of aluminum, travels 800 miles down the Amazon River to the Atlantic Ocean, passing communities, churches and infinite shades of green. Aluminum used to help build the popular electric Ford F-150 can be traced back to Brazil, where, in the heart of the Amazon, bauxite is being clawed from a mine that has faced allegations of pollution and land appropriation.
Shirell Parfait-Dardar is the first female chief of her tribe. Louisiana's Indigenous tribes have been protecting the coast for generations—and they’re still fighting to have their voices heard.
Taylor Black, 63, fills an underground cistern with potable water he hauled home from a well in Goulding, Utah, with help from his 1-year-old grandson, Bryant, and daughter Erika. Black also has to haul water for his horses and cattle. Thousands of Navajos have no clean running water at home, a crisis magnified by drought and government neglect.
On the edge of Garissa, Kenya, water is scarce. Many dig down through the sand on the bed of the dry Tyaa River to uncover pools of dirty water.
Signal Hill is a wealthy outlier amid Southern California’s oil extraction and production sites, which are more commonly situated in working-class Black and brown neighborhoods.
"As I've done this work I've learned so much about the city of LA and the state of California: it's toxic attributes, how these places treat the poorest people, the people whose voices and needs are drowned out or ignored in favor of capitalistic complicity, the constant desire to make more money at all costs which has for so long translated to 'drill, baby, drill' in this country.
But what I've learned more than that is how communities come together in the face of cancer, debilitating illness and the exhaustion experienced by the most hard working. This project means an opportunity to celebrate those people who do not define their worth by the money they make but by the lives they positively impact. I have turned my camera toward those who labor tirelessly to see justice realized for all."
Tara Pixley
Young Kayapó people play in the Branco River next to the Turedjam village. The river has been taken over by illegal mining in recent decades and its waters are dirty and contaminated.
A wild elephant steps in front of a truck carrying sugarcane in Khao Ang Rue Nai Wildlife Sanctuary, Chachoengsao province. Around 15 years ago, the elephant population reached a point where the sanctuary alone was unable to provide enough territory and food for the elephants. As a result, the elephants started leaving to find food and increase their territory, causing a dangerous ongoing conflict between farmers and villagers who live in the areas surrounding the wildlife sanctuary.
Kendrick Ransome is a co-founder of Freedom Org, and he runs Golden Organic Farm on land his family has owned for over 100 years in rural Pinetops, North Carolina. He grows healthier food for his family and for his community in a majority-Black county dotted with food deserts.
The Phinaya community is located 4,830 meters (15,850 feet) above sea level, in Cusco, Peru. It is the highest town near the snow-capped Quelccaya, which is rapidly thawing due to global warming.
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