Doug Mills and Moises Saman Win 2025 Pulitzer Prizes for Photography

Doug Mills, photographer for the New York Times, and Moises Saman, contributor to the New Yorker, have been named the winners of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in the two photography categories. Mills’s series of photos captured during the assassination attempt on Donald Trump won the Breaking News Photography category while Saman’s photos of the Sednya Prison in Syria took home the award for Feature Photography.

Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography

Doug Mills was one of three finalists alongside the Agence France-Presse Photography Staff (for their excellent coverage on the ground in Gaza) and Nanna Heitmann, Tyler Hicks, David Guttenfelde, and Nicole Tung of The New York Times (for their persistent photography of the war in Ukraine).

Doug Mills took home the award, “for a sequence of photos of the attempted assassination of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, including one image of a bullet whizzing through the air as he speaks” which he captured with the Sony a1 at a shutter speed of 1/8,000 second with a Sony 24mm f/1.4 GM. He also used the PDT-FP1 to transfer the photos, allowing him to get the images to his editor and therefore the public at lightning speed.

The photo sequence was captured in July 2024 when Donald Trump was holding a rally in Pennsylvania. Up until that point, Mills says that it was a “standard, typical” rally for the then-presidential hopeful and that he and about four other photographers were there covering the event until gunshots rang out.

“At first I thought it was a car. The last thing I thought was it was a gun,” Mills wrote at the time. “I kept taking pictures. He went down behind the lectern, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, something’s happened’.”

Mills says that he’s never been part of something so horrific.

“I’ve always feared being in this situation. I always wondered what I’d do in this situation. I hope I get the right shot. I hope I’m not shot myself.”

Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography

Moises Saman, a contributor to The New Yorker, was named the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for “his haunting black and white images of Sednaya Prison in Syria that capture the traumatic legacy of Assad’s torture chambers.” The series was published on December 30, 2024.

Saman was nominated alongside the Photography Staff of the Associated Press for their “brave and gripping imagery from Gaza that steps back from the front lines to chronicle daily life as it continues in a war zone,” and Lynsey Addario, contributor to The New York Times, for her “sensitive and wrenching photo essay of a young Ukrainian girl with a rare eye cancer, whose treatment was thwarted by the war.”

The full list of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize winners can be found on the organization’s website.