L.A. Times’ Yam Earns Capa Gold Medal Award From Overseas Press Club
Los Angeles Times Foreign Correspondent and Photographer Marcus Yam has won the prestigious Robert Capa Gold Medal Award for photography “requiring exceptional courage” with a series of thoughtfully curated visuals covering the first 30 days of war in Ukraine.
The award, named in honor of renowned Hungarian American war photographer Robert Capa, was presented on April 28 in New York City by the Overseas Press Club of America at its 84th annual awards dinner.
The competition’s judges called Yam’s work chronicling the early days of the war “an exceptional example of the power of photography to expand our collective conscience.”
“Yam’s reporting on the cruelty of war is carefully curated, displaying the expected terrors of human loss and mourning tempered with quiet moments of survival among people who carry on though their world is upended,” the judges noted.
“When I flew into Kharkiv four days before the war, I, like everyone else, hoped that the escalating tensions between Russia and Ukraine would be resolved through diplomacy,” Yam said in his acceptance speech. “And when it did not, all that was left for us to do was stay alive, do the work and navigate an unknown fraught with risks, trauma and also humanity. A year later, the war seems endless. I only hope that our work illuminates the dignity of the suffering that so many have endured.”
