Conflicts in photos

It’s not every day that you can walk into a room and find yourself talking to a double Pulitzer Prize winner like photographer Barbara Davidson, and have a conversation about how to turn your amateur portfolio into a professional one. And at the ongoing India Photography Festival in Hyderabad, Barbara — who currently works for the Los Angeles Times in the US — made sure that she was there to not just interact with, but also to inspire Indian photography talent.

Growing up in household of “loving photography”, Barbara says that her Irish grandfather’s amateur photography was what drew her to the world of still imagery. “My grandfather was a really good amateur photographer, and when my parents emigrated to Canada we used to have all these photographs from Ireland,” she says, “I developed a love for photography through those photographs and hearing stories about my grandfather.”

After a stint at the McGill Daily, a university magazine where she had her photograph published right from the first-ever roll of 35 mm film she shot out of, Barbara moved to USA to become a photojournalist. Her second job in the States was at the Dallas Morning News, where her team’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina won her her first Pulitzer.

Relatives of shooting victim Jamiel Shaw Jr near his casket. The photo series on victims of gangland killings got Barbara Davidson her second Pulitzer

“As I grew as a photographer I wanted to spend more time on issues that were important to me,” Barbara says, and this drove her to begin covering conflicts across international war-zones such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel and Gaza. “The kind of work that I did overseas, I was always interested in people caught in different conflict zones, in the innocent people caught in the crosshairs,” she says of what she wanted her focus to be, “I wasn’t a ‘bang-bang’ photographer; I wasn’t on the frontlines.”

Her second Pulitzer came when she was back stateside, and she documented the lives of innocents killed in LA’s “undeclared war-zones” of the city’s gangs.

In India for a few weeks, Barbara says she’s been spending her time shuttling between the festival and sight-seeing, and explains why she thinks festivals like these are important to promote local talent: “It’s important for cities like Hyderabad to host these festivals, because there are so many people hungry for knowledge and they don’t have access to a lot of professionals or institutions that can train people to the level where they want to be,” adding that she’d be featuring Indian photographers Sujatro Ghosh and Hyderabadi Satyanarayana Gola in her column in the Los Angeles Times.