On July 13th, Danish Siddiqui, the Pulitzer Prize-winning chief photographer for Reuters in India, posted footage of the Humvee he was riding in coming under fire in southern Afghanistan. Within days, Siddiqui, who was embedded with Afghan troops, was killed during a clash with the Taliban. In the days after his death, news organizations have posted collections of his most striking images. On social media and in conversations with me, people were astonished that one photojournalist had been responsible for so many singular images that captured uncomfortable truths. They also expressed surprise at the depth of their grief; it felt like being robbed of conviction.
India has grown more politically repressive in recent years, with new limits on images and language settling like layers of dust. A nebulous greater good has been invoked by Indian officials in a seeming effort to turn lived experience into something smaller. India is “too much of a democracy,” a prominent administrator close to the Prime Minister said last year. Siddiqui’s images enlarged the country’s disquiet, its people’s sufferings and their murmurs of dread. When major events unfolded, as they have at speed in India recently, Siddiqui was there. This past April, as hospitals ran out of oxygen and officials downplayed COVID deaths, his photograph of funeral pyres at a New Delhi cremation ground was undeniable evidence that Indians were dying in vast numbers.
In February of last year, in the midst of protests and riots over a law that discriminated against Muslims, Siddiqui photographed members of a Hindu mob beating and bloodying a Muslim man in New Delhi; the image demonstrated impunity and pointed to where India’s new centers of power lay. A few weeks earlier, when a radicalized Hindu teen-ager wielding a pistol stood before peaceful marchers and opened fire in New Delhi, Siddiqui’s camera captured something more. Before arresting the shooter, police initially watched from a distance, not rushing, not protecting.
Siddiqui, who was thirty-eight, was a largely self-taught photographer. He said that ninety per cent of what he knew he had learned through experimentation. He took pictures slowly, almost leisurely, Md Meharban, a young photojournalist whom Siddiqui mentored, told me. By example, he showed younger colleagues, whose instinct it was to rush headlong into a moment, that understanding the story before taking a picture made the resulting work deeper. He made them feel at home, the young photographer said, by giving them work and generous feedback, and sharing his car and his cigarettes.
Suchitra Vijayan, the director of the Polis Project, a nonprofit journalism and research organization, told me that there were many more victims of violence who were not captured in any images. But she said that Siddiqui’s journalism will be important for future generations who want to make sense of their past. “I see Danish’s work as memory-keeping, at a time when we have lost our capacity to think or remember,” she said. “I think his greatest contribution was creating a visual archive of state violence, and the landscape that violence remade.”
