2005 Infinity Award: Photojournalism

On April 30, 2004, The New Yorker, under the direction of editor David Remnick, posted a report on its website by investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh that exposed acts of humiliation and torture that had taken place in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Accompanying the piece were a number of graphic and disturbing images of the torture, taken by U. S. military prison guards with digital cameras. This article, entitled “Torture at Abu Ghraib” was published in the May 10, 2004, issue of The New Yorker, and was followed in the next two weeks by two more articles on the same subject, “Chain of Command” and “The Gray Zone,” also by Mr. Hersh.

The amateur photographs were in the possession of CBS News, but the network had, by its own account, acceded to the Pentagon’s request to delay broadcasting such sensitive and controversial photographs. It was only after they learned that The New Yorker planned to publish the pictures in its next issue that they went ahead with their report on April 28. When The New Yorker published Mr. Hersh’s story a few days later, it made the photographs widely available and placed them in context with classified government reports he had uncovered. Publications around the world followed suit, and what became known as the Abu Ghraib scandal sparked a series of criminal investigations into the extent of prison abuses.

David Remnick is the fifth editor of The New Yorker. Along with his work at The New Yorker, Remnick won the Pulitzer Prize for his book Lenin's Tomb, and gained positive critical acclaim for a follow-up book on Russia titled Resurrection, and another on Muhammad Ali, King of the World.  Seymour M. Hersh, a staff writer for The New Yorker, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its subsequent cover-up during the Vietnam War.