UB alumnus Marcus Yam wins Pulitzer Prize in photography

UB alumnus and Los Angeles Periods roving international correspondent and photojournalist Marcus Yam has received the Pulitzer Prize — his third — for breaking information pictures. The Pulitzer Prize winners had been announced previously this 7 days, honoring the finest in U.S. journalism.

Yam, BS ’06, who shared the award for breaking information pictures with 4 photographers from Getty Photographs, was honored for his “raw and urgent illustrations or photos of the U.S. departure from Afghanistan that capture the human price of the historic modify in the nation.”

A Los Angeles Moments story reporting on Yam’s Pulitzer calls Yam a “journalist with a warrior’s braveness and a poet’s coronary heart.”

Yam shipped images of unspeakable tragedy and abiding emotion despite a manhandling by a person of the insurgents, the in the vicinity of-constant menace of other fighters and the ample specialized hurdles of transmitting visuals out of a war zone, the story notes.

In a latest job interview with At Buffalo, UB’s alumni journal, Yam recalled his terrifying face with a Taliban fighter even though documenting the Afghanistan disaster. “If he points his gun at me, I’m useless,” he reported.

Patrick Quickly-Shiong, operator and govt chairman of The Los Angeles Situations, instructed newspaper staffers in a videoconference how proud and scared he was previous summer season as he adopted Yam’s harrowing protection in Afghanistan.

“You have been out there carrying out wonderful items,” Quickly-Shiong reported. “What you have finished, with the images and the photos, was so crucial for the earth. The phrase ‘genocide’ definitely needs to be said. And your pictorial definitely delivers it home. It is definitely crucial.”

Times’ Government Editor Kevin Merida also praised Yam, saying, “We are happy of Marcus Yam for the raw energy and humanity of his photojournalism in Afghanistan.”

Born and lifted in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Yam came to UB to examine aerospace engineering and left besotted by photojournalism. Yam, who worked on the workers of the UB university student newspaper The Spectrum, recognized early on in his internship with The Buffalo News during his senior 12 months that photography was his real calling. He ultimately landed stints with The Affiliated Press, The Washington Publish, The New York Times and The Seattle Situations right before signing up for the LA Instances.

He spoke previously about how his engineering qualifications plays a role in his technique to photojournalism. “It really informs my work,” he reported. “I just take a incredibly analytical and complex tactic to anything that I shoot.”

“Marcus was a excellent, exceptional scholar,” Kemper Lewis, dean of UB’s University of Engineering and Utilized Sciences, informed At Buffalo. “I saw him in class one working day with a camera close to his neck and asked him about it. Photography was clearly a enthusiasm he built a good deal of time for, which instructed me he was disciplined — most engineering college students are overcome by just their homework by yourself.”

Yam was awarded a 2015 Pulitzer Prize for his job in The Seattle Times’ protection of a horrific mudslide that killed 43 men and women in rural Washington. He was also section of the Pulitzer Prize-profitable breaking news crew that lined the San Bernardino, California, terrorist assaults in 2015 for the LA Instances.