Russian photographer Sergey Ponomarev has won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for news photography for a series of pictures capturing the struggle of refugees and their host countries for The New York Times, the Pulitzer Prize board announced on Monday.
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Ponomarev won the prize together with his New York Times colleagues Mauricio Lima, Tyler Hicks and Daniel Etter “for photographs that captured the resolve of refugees, the perils of their journeys and the struggle of host countries to take them in,” the Pulitzer Prize board said.
The winning photographs chronicled the plight of Syrian refugees trying to make a journey to Europe in 2015.
The award makes Ponomarev the second Russian photographer to win the Pulitzer Prize in recent decades.
Photographer Alexander Zemlianichenko of The Associated Press was part of a team that won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in spot news photography for photographs of the 1991 attempted coup against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and the subsequent collapse of Communist rule.
Zemlianichenko then went on to win a second Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for a photograph of Russia's then-President Boris Yeltsin dancing at a concert during his 1996 re-election campaign.
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