2010 Infinity Award: Cornell Capa Award

Peter Magubane was born in 1932 in Vrededorp and grew up in Sophiatown in the suburbs of Johannesburg, South Africa. First published in Drum magazine in 1954, Magubane covered many important political events in the 1950s, including treason trials and demonstrations. After freelancing in London in the early 1960s, he returned to South Africa and worked for the Rand Daily Mail from 1967 until 1980. From 1969 to 1976, Magubane was repeatedly arrested and interrogated for his activities, jailed or kept in solitary confinement for months at a time, and banned from his position at the Rand Daily Mail for five years. In 1976, he was hospitalized after his nose was broken by the police and his house was burnt down. In 1985, he was shot seventeen times at a student's funeral in Natalspruit. His coverage of the uprisings in Soweto (June 1976) brought worldwide acclaim and led to a number of international photographic and journalistic awards, including the American National Professional Photographers Association Humanistic Award in 1986, in recognition of one of several incidents in which he put his camera aside and intervened to help prevent people from being killed. From 1978 until 1980, Magubane worked as a correspondent for Time magazine, after which time he moved to New York. Magubane has photographed for several United Nations agencies, including the High Commission for Refugees and UNICEF, and his photographs have appeared in The New York Times, Life, Time, Newsweek,National Geographic, Paris Match, and The Washington Post, among others. His honors include the Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism from the University of Missouri (1992) for his lifelong coverage of apartheid, the Robert Capa Award (1986), and Lifetime Achievement Award from the Mother Jones Foundation (1997).