This post is in response to the Feb. 7th prompt that asked us to choose one of a selection of Pulitzer-Prize-winning photographs and to discuss the image’s composition and context.

The photograph that I selected is Carol Guzy’s “Refugees from Kosovo,” below:

Carol Guzy, 1999 (from Pulitzer Prize Photo Exhibit handout)

This image makes use of several very effective photographic techniques to present an effective and striking glimpse of its subject. First, the photographer has carefully cropped the photograph to ensure that the image’s focus is clearly on the child, rather than on the people surrounding it: the head and body of the left-hand person (the one in the grey shirt) have been removed. Second, the photographer uses colour to great effect: unlike the other subjects in the photograph’s foreground, who are dressed in grey, the child’s outfit is a vivid shade of teal — another way to ensure that the eye is drawn first to the child, the photograph’s subject and also paralleling the rich blues of the sky and mountains in the background. Finally, the photographer employs leading lines to draw the viewers’ eyes to the central focal point:

Some of the leading lines enhanced on "Refugees from Kosovo" (Guzy , 1999, photo taken from Pulitzer Prize Photo handout, editing own)

The photographer has also made use of the “rule of thirds”: the idea that a photograph should be divided into nine equal segments by a grid of lines, two horizontal and two vertical, and that all of the photograph’s action should take place along those lines:

Rule-of-thirds grid imposed over "Refugees from Kosovo" (Guzy, 1999, from Pulitzer Prize Photo handout, editing own.)

Here we see that although the photographer opted for a somewhat more centered composition than in many shots, she still incorporated the rule of thirds into her shot: the child’s head is positioned directly at the lower right-hand intersection, while its mother or aunt (on the right) is on the same horizontal line and the hands of its other family members (on the left) are caught on the left-hand vertical line.

This image was taken May 3, 1999 in Kukes, Albania, where ethnic Albanians were flocking to a refugee camp, desperate to get away from the interethnic violence in their home province of Kosovo. Kosovo, a province in the former Yugoslavia, was at the time in the middle of a war between the ethnic Albanian and ethnic Serbian people with much violence on both sides. On this day at the refugee camp, Carol Guzy says, a large number of new arrivals had come to the camp from Prizren, but could not enter until enough tents had been prepared for them. Family members waited anxiously at the wire fence marking the camp’s border, trying to find relatives on the other side of the fence and passing (as in this photograph) greetings — and small children — back and forth. Guzy felt that this photograph  captured “the innocence and the horror” of Kosovo at the time. (all referenced information in the above paragraph from this blurb.)