The photographer Danish Siddiqui joined the Reuters agency as an intern in 2010 and a year later, at the age of 28, became its full-time stringer in Mumbai. He concentrated at first on images of the city’s streets – colleagues recall how he often spent weeks getting to know his subjects in order to convey the truth of their lives. This picture of the chicken seller asleep on his cart is typical of his pictures of that period. Siddiqui graduated quickly to frontline news for the agency, covering the war in Afghanistan and the battle to retake Mosul from Islamic State. He received two Pulitzer prizes for his work: the first as part of the team covering the Rohingya refugee crisis and the second for his profound images documenting the spread of Covid-19 across the subcontinent.
That latter prize was awarded to Siddiqui posthumously. On 16 July 2021 he was killed by Taliban fighters in Kandahar province, having been embedded with Afghan special forces, one of 80 working journalists to lose their life in that conflict. He was 38 years old. A book of his photographs was published this summer to mark two years since his death, with proceeds going to his widow and two children. The book is, on every page, an expression not only of Siddiqui’s talent and his courage, but of his determination to give a human face to some of the world’s injustices. He was, by the accounts of colleagues, always a man with that mission. He said in a Ted Talk in 2014: “As a photojournalist, I am exposed to the best of humanity and to the worst and everything in between. My role is as a mirror; I want to expose you to the raw truth [of the world] and make you a witness to it. You can look away – or you can stand up and act for change.”
• Danish Siddiqui is published by Kehrer Verlag (€49.90)
