The image of firefighter Chris Fields holding the dying infant Baylee Almon won the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography in 1996.Two people, Lester LaRue and Charles Porter, standing just three feet apart took almost the same image yet it was Charles Porter’s image that won the Pulitzer.

At 9:02, on April 19, 1995, Gulf War vet, Timothy McVeigh detonated 4,800 lbs of fertilizer and fuel oil. The resulting blast destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal government Building and killed 168 people. The bombing, largest act of domestic terrorism, in America, shattered pre-911 America’s innocence.

As the fires raged rescue services and bystanders rushed to pull victims out of the twisted wreckage. Sifting through the rubble police officer, Sgt. John Avera found a small half buried body. Shouting. “I have a critical infant! I have a critical infant!” he thrust the, 1-year-old Baylee Almon into the arms of nearby firefighter Oklahoma City fire Capt. Chris Fields.

Photographer: Charles Porter
Source: oklahomacitybombing.com

The photo is part of The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning entry (2000) showing how a Kosovar refugee Agim Shala, 2, is passed through a barbed wire fence into the hands of grandparents at a camp run by United Arab Emirates in Kukes, Albania. The members of the Shala family were reunited here after fleeing the conflict in Kosovo.

Photographer: Carol Guzy
Source: washingtonpost.com

Picture of bullet casings carpet a street in Monrovia (the capital of Liberia), at the heart of the battlefield between government and rebel soldiers. Businesses closed for weeks as the battle raged. Carolyn won pulitzer prize in 2004 with the set of pictures containing this one.

Photographer: Carolyn Cole
Source: Pulitzer.org

Picture of an infant in the AIDS ward of Victor Babes Hospital shot in Bucharest 1990, after the fall of Ceausescu. Press said then that 25% of all orphan kids from Romania’s orphanages were HIV positive. Truth is there were a lot of infected kids but no way a quarter of them.

Anyway, for his photographs of ill and orphaned children living in subhuman conditions in Romania William Snyder received a Pulitzer in 1991.

Photographer: William Snyder (The Dallas Morning News)
Source: nppa.org

This picture was taken only a second before the japanese socialist Party leader Asanuma was assassinated by an right wing student. Photographer Yasushi Nagao said he was only on the right place and on the right time. He received a Pulitzer price for this photo.

Photographer: Yasushi Nagao
Source: artnet.com

UPDATE: video footage of the assassination:

On July 22, 1975, photograph Stanley J. Forman working for the Boston Herald American newspaper when a police scanner picked up an emergency: “Fire on Marlborough Street!”
Climbed on a the fire truck, Forman shot the picture of a young woman, Diana Bryant, and a very young girl, Tiare Jones when they fell helplessly. Diana Bryant was pronounced dead at the scene. The young girl lived. Despite a heroic effort, the fireman who tried to grab them had been just seconds away from saving the lives of both.

Photo coverage from the tragic event garnered Stanley Forman a Pulitzer Prize. But more important, his work paved the way for Boston and other states to mandate tougher fire safety codes.

Photographer: Stanley J. Forman
Source: bbc.co.uk

The girl in the picture is Phan Thị Kim Phúc also known as Kim Phuc (born in 1963), a nine-year old running naked and severely burned on her back by a napalm atack.

Photographer Huynh Cong Ut, known by his colleagues as Nick, was working there as a photo journalist for Associated Press at the time and took a number of photographs of the villagers trying to escape the napalm. This one, epitomising the savagery and tragedy of the conflict, won him the coveted Pulitzer Prize and became one of the most published photos of the Vietnam war.

The boy is her older brother Tam who survived the attack but lost an eye. Ut (the photographer) poured water onto the young girl and took her and some of the other children to a hospital near Saigon where she spent fourteen months recovering from the horrific burns to her skin.

Later, the girl studied medicine and now she; a UNESCO member living in Canada.

Photographer: Huynh Cong Ut (Associated Press)
Source: wikipedia.org

The photo is the “Pulitzer Prize” winning photo taken in 1994 during the Sudan Famine.
The picture depicts stricken child crawling towards an United Nations food camp, located a kilometer away.

The vulture is waiting for the child to die so that it can eat him. This picture shocked the whole world. No one knows what happened to the child, including the photographer Kevin Carter who
left the place as soon as the photograph was taken.

Three months later he committed suicide due to depression.

Photographer: Kevin Carter
Source: Wikipedia.org

This picture won the Pulitzer Breaking News Photography 2007 award. Photo’s citation reads, “Awarded to Oded Balilty of The Associated Press for his powerful photograph of a lone Jewish woman defying Israeli security forces as they remove illegal settlers in the West Bank.â€?

Photographer:Oded Balilty (Associated Press)
Source: www.photojournalism.org