Real Lives
Saher Alghorra photographed his own city and won the Pulitzer
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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The photographer who won journalism's best-known prize this year did it without leaving home, because home was the story and he could not have left it if he had wanted to.
Saher Alghorra was born in Gaza City in 1997. He got his first camera in 2017 and started photographing the ordinary fragility around him. He turned professional as a freelancer in 2021, working for international agencies, and by the time the war began he was the person best placed to show his city to people who would never be allowed into it.
On Monday 4 May the Pulitzer board named him the winner in breaking news photography, for a series it called haunting and sensitive, showing the devastation and starvation in Gaza produced by the war with Israel. He made it as a contributor to the New York Times. The winning body of work carries the title "Trapped in Gaza: Between Fire and Famine".
What the frames cost to make#
The prize was the third international recognition of the same eye. The Lucie Impact Award came in 2023. The International Committee of the Red Cross gave him its Humanitarian Visa d'or in 2025 for his photography of civilians in Gaza. Last October the Prix Bayeux Calvados-Normandie, in its thirty-second year, gave him first prize for war photography.
He has described the position his colleagues work from without any drama in his voice. Palestinian photographers, he told Al Jazeera, no longer have the luxury of choosing between fleeing and staying at home.
Attacks on his integrity followed the Pulitzer, alleging staged scenes and connections he does not have; the New York Times examined them and called them baseless.
Set that beside the record. A young man from Gaza City who bought a camera at twenty, and whose photographs of his neighbours are now the images by which this war will be remembered.
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