Photographer Doug Mills on Winning the 2025 Pulitzer Prize! | The PetaPixel Podcast
In a special bonus episode of The PetaPixel Podcast, we spoke with award-winning veteran photojournalist Doug Mills about his latest Pulitzer Prize — his third — which he won for his series of photos showing a speeding bullet whizzing past now-President Donald Trump during an attempted assassination in Pennsylvania last year. Mills discussed how he captured the winning photos, how the latest gear empowers photojournalism, and the rapidly changing political landscape in which he operates.
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Mills’ Third Pulitzer Prize is his First Solo Win
The 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography is Mills’ third Pulitzer, but his first solo one. He previously won two team Pulitzers working with The Associated Press in the 1990s for his coverage of the Clinton/Gore campaign and the later Monica Lewinsky affair.
“It’s an honor to get this award no matter whether you’re in a team or individually,” Mills tells PetaPixel editor-in-chief Jaron Schneider in the interview above. “But yeah, this one feels a lot more special, a lot more rewarding, a lot more uplifting. It’s an incredible achievement, and I’m really honored to be presented with this award by the Pulitzer Committee because I know they looked at a lot of great work this year. I’m really thankful for it. It does feel amazing.”
How Mills Expertly Navigated the Violent Chaos in Pennsylvania
Mills describes a chaotic scene when capturing his award-winning photo series on July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania. He was in a buffer zone near the stage with three other photographers when the 20-year-old would-be assassin, who killed one audience member during his attempt, fired eight rounds at Trump from a nearby building roof. Mills doesn’t own a firearm, so he did not immediately recognize the popping sounds as gunfire, but then all hell broke loose.
“When I realized he went down so quickly, he looked at his hand, went down, and then you’re running around hearing ‘active shooter, active shooter, get down, get down.’ I’m looking around me and I see some of the other staff members, a couple cameramen that were in the buffer zone — they were already taking cover, and the President fell out of my sight,” Mills explains. “He went behind the protective Kevlar that is built around him on the stage. Everywhere they speak, there’s a built-in barrier, but obviously it’s not that tall — not that high. But he went down behind that, so my first instinct was to go towards it because I wanted to see what was going on.”
Mills, who never heard the Secret Service shots that killed the assailant, said he had no idea how badly Trump had been hurt at the time.
“Much like when Ronald Reagan was shot, you saw him get in the car, you didn’t know he was shot,” Mills explains. “But on this one, when I look back at the frames real quick and I could see him grabbing his ear, I was like, ‘oh my gosh, he has been shot.’ And the next thing you know, they’re lifting him up, he gives that fist pump, and then they take him off and whisked him away into the SUV.”
‘My first instinct was to go towards [the Kevlar barrier] because I wanted to see what was going on.’
‘Are You Kidding Me?’: The Whizzing Bullet Seen Around the World
Mills did not initially realize he had captured one of the assassin’s bullets whizzing in the air past Trump’s head, but he did immediately get to work. He quickly began wirelessly transmitting photos from his Sony camera to the New York Times photo desk.
He got a call from acclaimed New York Times White House correspondent and journalist Maggie Haberman, who was worried about Doug’s safety. Once she realized he was okay, she began grilling the photographer about everything he saw and whether Trump had actually been shot or had perhaps been injured by shrapnel.
“He’s definitely been shot,” Mills told Haberman.
“Why do you say that?” she replied, as Mills describes it.
“I said, ‘Well, I’m looking at the frames where he grimaces, and then he looks, grabbed his ear, and then looks at his ear and sees the blood on his ear, and he goes down.'”
Based on Mills ‘ observations and photos, Haberman was updating her story on the fly. At this point, Mills received a second call from the photo desk asking if he had images of Trump when he was shot at while speaking.
“I said, ‘Oh yeah, lemme go look.’ So I went back through my camera and I’m looking at him and I’m like, ‘Oh yeah,’ and I had a wide-angle lens on. I was zooming in and then I said, ‘I can see him grimacing going down,” Mills says.
At this point, Mills still didn’t know there was a whizzing bullet in any of his frames, as he had only seen them on his camera’s monitor. After sending through his selected photos, Mills got a third call, again from the desk.
“One of our people in art production who’s putting together a triptych just noticed that you have a bullet flying behind his head,” the desk told Mills.
“I was like, ‘Holy shit, are you kidding me?’ And she said, ‘No, no, no, I’m going to text you the photo right away.’ So she texted me the photo and I looked at it, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh,'” Mills exclaims.
Mills had only sent JPEG files through to the desk, so he wanted to make sure the RAW file had the bullet, too, and that this wasn’t some weird artifact or error. Mills wanted to check the RAW file, but it was on his laptop, which was now in an active crime scene. When he finally got to retrieve his computer, sure enough, the RAW file showed the same thing — a bullet.
“By the time I got to my laptop, I opened it up in RAW and my heart was pounding out of my chest,” Mills recalls. “And so when I opened it up in RAW and looked at it, I was like, ‘Oh my god.’ So I called the desk and said, ‘Jen, it’s here.'”
Mills sent every possible frame he could from the parking lot at the event.
“I was in shock, believe me. To see that and to think that 1/8,000th of a second could stop a bullet was pretty incredible,” Mills says.
“And so when I opened it up in RAW and looked at it, I was like, ‘Oh my god.'”
How Equipment Empowers Photojournalism
Mills also made the fateful choice that day to use a 24mm prime lens on his Sony a1 camera, rather than a longer telephoto lens.
“When the bullets started flying and I ran around to the side, I realized, ‘Okay, my 70-200mm’s too tight for this. I better stay with the 24mm.’ It was kind of chaotic, so I hit the crop mode to try and zoom in where the President was, with all the Secret Service on top of him. And then I basically never took it off crop mode,” Mills explains.
As Mills describes it, the latest and greatest equipment is a lifeline for photojournalists. The camera is their “tool,” and photographers like Mills have many tools in their bag these days.
When new gear comes out, Mills is among the first to raise his hand and ask to try it.
“I’ve been around a long time. I started in 1983 covering the White House, and we were shooting film and running the film out to the Northwest gate,” Mills says. A guy on a motorcycle waited there to take the film back to the office for processing. That’s a far cry from the modern workflow, when Mills can send hundreds of high-resolution digital photos to the photo desk directly from his Sony camera anywhere in the world.
Mills was an early adopter of digital photography.
“I remember my former chief photographer, Bob Doherty at AP said, ‘Listen, kid, if you don’t keep up with technology, you’re going to be left behind,” Mills remembers.
Since then, whenever a new camera or lens hits the scene, Mills is itching to get his hands on it. The 65-year-old photographer believes his adaptability and willingness to try new gear have been vital to his longevity.
He has been using Sony Alpha mirrorless cameras for “eight or nine years,” and Mills says the faster focus and lighter cameras and lenses have enabled him to work faster and capture better photos.
If Mills didn’t have the latest Sony PDT-FP1 transmitter, for example, he would have been left in the dust in Butler last July. He and AP photographer Evan Vucci, known for his iconic photo of a bloodied Trump raising his fist in front of an American flag, were the only two photographers there with the latest Sony transmitter, Mills believes.
“We were really the first ones to get our photos out… that’s what makes the difference,” Mills says.
More From Pulitzer Prize-Winning Photojournalists Doug Mills
The rest of PetaPixel‘s interview with three-time Pulitzer-winning photojournalist Doug Mills can be viewed at the top of this article. We discuss a diverse range of topics, including the politicization of photojournalism, separating political ideologies from news photography, how breaking news photography differs from Mills’ experience shooting sports, evolving camera technology, and much more.
Doug Mills’ photography is on Instagram and The New York Times.
Image credits: Douglas Mills, Photojournalist with the New York Times | All photos used with permission.
