'I Am Happy I Knew When To Drop The Camera And Save The Kids'

Danish Siddiqui, 34, and Reuters colleague Adnan Abidi are the first Indian photojournalists to win the Pulitzer. Siddiqui talks about his coverage of the Rohingya crisis

- Kathakali Chanda

Q How did you plan to go about the coverage of the Rohingyas?

I wanted to show the story as it was happening. But we didn’t have access to Myanmar, where all the action was [due to a government crackdown]. So Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh was my base and I was working in the villages and small towns around it. My motto was to show an entire story in one frame.

Luckily, the two pictures I took in the series did just that. In one, you can see a Rohingya village burning in the background and, in the other, a woman lying on the beach and others jumping off the boat. The second (shown above) was my favourite because it’s a challenge to get the whole story in one picture. One person in a frame can be anywhere; it is important to show why the people are there.

Q What was the story behind that photo?