Pulitzer winning Indian journalist and the chief of Indian Multimedia team at Reuters, Danish Siddiqui was killed in the clashes between Afghan Special forces and Taliban in the Spin Boldak district, Afghanistan here on Friday. He was, is an expert in bringing out implausible frames from the most vulnerable spaces.
His photographs drew an untold conflation of justice. Often pictures strive to speak something, here his works reiterate realities. A mirror indeed. Amid state chastise Danish was brave enough to do that in the most beautiful way possible.
Human faces, it appears, to be his niche (frame). He was an adept in capturing transverse human feelings within chaos. His photographs in the backdrop of the Covid 19 , the pictures of Northeast Delhi violence in February 2020 and many others clearly proves it. Let his frames speak the rest;
♦ The above picture brought the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography to Danish along with Adnan Abidi. Hundreds of thousands Rohingya Muslims were forced to flee across the border into Bangladesh after a deadly crackdown on 2017 by the Myanmar army. Siddiqui captured this image of a stranded Rohingya refugee woman after crossing the Bangladesh-Myanmar border by boat which was phenomenal to depict how such "ethnic cleansing" was weary to the common lives.
♦Rambhakt Gopal, A teenager shot against anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protesters near Jamia Millia Islamia University in Delhi on January 30, 2020. Danish was resolute to shoot him (with his lens) even while the police stood sloth.
♦ A group of men chanting pro-Hindutva slogans, beat Mohammad Zubair, 37, who is Muslim, during protests sparked by a new citizenship law in New Delhi, India .This image was widely circulated as the iconic image of the North-East Delhi violence. Somehow Zubair survived.
♦An image of mass cremation of victims who died due to the corona virus in Delhi called out the guise that India had a better covid coping system
♦In frame, Dayaram Kushwaha - a migrant worker carrying his son on his shoulders on their way back to village on foot, during a 21-day nationwide lockdown to limit the spreading of corona virus in Delhi. His delicacy has made him go back to the same migrant once they reached home safe.
♦An image from a hospital in Delhi while Covid second wave hit the nation drastically. The picture claimed the reality of Indian hospitals while the majority was bragging on how the state was confronting the pandemic.