It feels like yesterday when I received the news that I had won the inaugural Yannis Behrakis International Photojournalism Award in Oct 2019. At the time, the situation in Kashmir was so tense you could slice the tension with a cake knife. Winning the award was the only bright spot during a very bleak period of life in Kashmir. But today, even a year later, it still makes me happy that I won an award instituted in Yannis’ name. Someone who believed that his mission with the camera was simply to “make sure that nobody can say: I didn’t know.” It’s in that spirit that this award means so much to me. No one can look at the images coming out of Kashmir or any part of world today, let alone over the past several decades, and say “I didn’t know.”

In this period of enormous global uncertainty and restricted travel, it’s very heartening to see how photojournalism has stepped up and documented the first rough draft of our times from all corners of the globe. As I look through the many newspapers, magazines, websites and of course, social media handles, I discover to my delight that it doesn’t matter if there are a thousand cameras capturing every waking moment of our life – what’s important is the storytelling that shines through the work of professional photojournalists. It takes a special kind of eye and an even more special heart to capture an image that manages to speak the equivalent of a thousand words or more to an audience of billions. And that is when I miss fellow photojournalists like Yannis. His integrity, his passion and his single-minded determination to record history – I know he would have left no stone unturned to record our shared humanity during this time.

It’s a responsibility, an honor and a privilege to bear witness. Yannis knew that. His pictures are testimony to that. He left the world a little bit better than he found it. I can only hope that someday, the same can be said of all us. Thank you!