An Indian photojournalist employed with the international news agency Reuters, Danish Siddiqui worked on reportage and feature stories on a range of cultural and political issues in India and abroad. He received the Pulitzer Prize twice, for his documentation of the Rohingya refugee crisis in Bangladesh and the Covid-19 pandemic in India. His photographs have been acclaimed for their sensitive treatment of their subjects and as important documents of major political events.

Education and career

Siddiqui was born in Delhi in 1983. He obtained a bachelor’s degree in Economics at Jamia Millia Islamia university, and a master’s degree in Mass Communication from the AJK Mass Communication Research Centre, where he was introduced to photography and photojournalism. He then worked as a correspondent for Hindustan Times and the news channel TV Today between 2008 and early 2010. He joined Reuters in 2010 as an intern at the Delhi bureau, and moved soon after to the Mumbai bureau as a full-time photographer. 

In 2019, Siddiqui became the Chief Photographer for Reuters India, and moved back to Delhi to coordinate nationwide reportage with a team of journalists, while continuing to travel for assignments himself. He worked at Reuters until his death in 2021. In addition, Siddiqui also contributed photographs to numerous major international media outlets including National Geographic, New York Times, The Guardian, Time Magazine, Forbes, NPR, BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, South China Morning Post, Le Figaro, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and Gulf News.

Feature stories 

Early in his career, Siddiqui developed a street photography practice in Mumbai; a notable personal project from the period documents the city’s iconic single-screen theatres and their patrons. For Reuters he covered various civic and political issues in the city, particularly those affecting low-income communities. Between 2010 and 2017 he also travelled widely around India, documenting religious festivals around the country; reporting on child marriage in Rajasthan and flood relief efforts in Uttarakhand; and covering the impact of industrial pollution on various communities. A photo from Siddiqui’s visual essay on the pollution of the Ganga River won the 2017 Atlanta Photojournalism Award for feature photography. Siddiqui’s international reporting began with an assignment in Afghanistan in 2012, where he was part of a team that documented the life of American soldiers deployed there; while there, he also documented the cinema-going culture in Kabul.   

Crisis reportage

In 2015 Siddiqui reported on the Nepal earthquake. In 2017, he was embedded with military and police forces in Iraq to document the Battle of Mosul. In 2018, Siddiqui and his colleague Adnan Abidi, as part of a team of Reuters photojournalists, became the first Indians to win a Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for their reportage on the Rohingya refugee crisis unfolding along the Bangladesh–Myanmar border in 2017. Among the first journalists to cover the crisis, the team comprised Siddiqui, Abidi, Mohammad Ponir Hossain, Soe Zeya Tun, Hannah McKay, Damir Sagolj and Cathal McNaughton. Both of Siddiqui’s winning selections foreground individual refugees as they first arrive from Myanmar by boat to mainland Bangladesh, while smoke is seen rising from burning huts behind them. 

Between 2018 and 2020, Siddiqui continued to undertake a range of projects both internationally and in India, covering the April 2019 Easter bombing at St. Sebastian Church in Negombo, Sri Lanka; the December 2019 mass protests in Hong Kong against the Chinese government’s amendments to the Fugitive Offenders Ordinance; and the lockdown in the erstwhile Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir after the passage of the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act in August 2019. 

In early 2020 he documented the widespread protests against the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in India, and the riots in Delhi soon after. By going undercover as a Hindu nationalist he was able to document violence being inflicted on Muslims, in images that became widely circulated. One shows a Hindu mob armed with sticks attacking a Muslim man curled up on the ground; another shows a man threatening protesters with a gun at a peaceful sit-in at the Jamia Millia Islamia university, while police look on. He won the Hong Kong Human Rights Press Award in the Photography (Series) category the following year for his coverage of the anti-CAA protests. 

In 2020–21, Siddiqui also documented the large-scale farmer protests against a proposed deregulation of the agricultural wholesale market, with photographs showing their march from Punjab and Haryana to New Delhi and subsequent peaceful demonstrations; the Kisan Mahapanchayat (farmers’ conference) which drew tens of thousands of farmers from across states; as well as the community traditions and rituals — particularly of the Sikh farmers — that were integrated into the protest.  

Siddiqui was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography, along with fellow Reuters photographers Amit Dave, Sanna Irshad Mattoo and Abidi, in 2022 for his coverage of the second wave of Covid-19 in India. The team’s work was praised internationally for their coverage of the scale of devastation and the challenges arising from the country’s overburdened health infrastructure, especially the severe shortage of oxygen and medical supplies in some states. The most widely disseminated of Siddiqui’s six chosen photographs is an aerial drone shot of flames rising from a communal cremation at an open field in New Delhi, adjacent to a crowded cluster of apartment buildings.  

Death

In 2021, while embedded with Afghan security forces to document the war in Afghanistan, Siddiqui was shot and killed during a clash with the Taliban after being mistakenly left behind by the security convoy escaping the site, in circumstances that were subject to multiple international investigations.  

Criticism

While Siddiqui’s work over his career gained international acclaim, it attracted widespread detraction from Indian right-wing media outlets and individuals. His coverage of the pandemic was seen as critical of the incumbent government’s handling of the crisis, and his coverage of the 2020 Delhi riots contradicted the government’s claims that violence was being instigated by students and Muslim mobs. Notably, Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not comment on Siddiqui’s death, despite condolences issued from international media organisations, the United Nations, the US and Afghan governments, as well as the Taliban.

Other awards, retrospectives and publications

A month after Siddiqui’s death, an exhibition of his work titled Life and Death on the Frontline of New Delhi’s Second Wave was held at the Visa pour l’Image festival in Perpignan, France. He was posthumously conferred with several awards, in addition to the Pulitzer: in December 2021,  the RedInk Journalist of the Year (2020) award by the Mumbai Press Club; in 2022, the Reuters Baron Award for his contributions to the organisation, the Reuters Photojournalist of the Year and Photo of the Year awards, and the Hugo Shong Award for reporting in Asia. The Danish Siddiqui Foundation was established that year to provide training and support for young photojournalists; in 2025, the Foundation launched the inaugural Danish Siddiqui Journalism Award. A book containing selections of his work, titled Danish Siddiqui, was published by Kehrer Verlag in 2023.