2014 Photography Pulitzer Prize Winners

Diana Markosian’s Father is an intimate and engrossing diaristic portrayal of estrangement and reconnection, recounted through documentary photographs, family snapshots, text, and visual ephemera.

Diana Markosian: Father presents the photographer’s journey to another place and another time, where Markosian attempts to piece together an image of a familiar stranger—her long-lost father. The book explores her father’s absence, her reconciliation with him, and the shared emptiness of their prolonged estrangement. The images, made over the course of a decade, take place in her father’s home in Armenia. In Markosian’s first monograph, Santa Barbara (Aperture, 2020), the photographer recreates the story of her family’s journey from post–Soviet Russia to the US in the 1990s. Father uses both documentary photographs and archives of objects, letters, and vernacular images to probe the fifteen years of absence and separation from the photographer’s childhood. In this voyage of self-discovery, Markosian touchingly renders her longing for connection to a man she barely remembers and who asks her, when she finds him, “Why did it take you so long?”

Pedro Jarque Krebs presents WildLOVE, his long-awaited second major photo book. With his colorful photography of wild animals, he occupies a special place in wildlife photography. One of the world's most awarded wildlife photographer captures the animals with his camera in a humorous and almost human way. In this way, he builds up an intimate relationship with each animal: WildLOVE.

Pedro Jarque Krebs is a most awarded wildlife photographer with more than 100 awards to his credit. His aim is to show the beauty and diversity of wildlife, but also to draw attention to the problems and fragility of the animal world.

Travelling widely, Ralph Gibson works primarily in inspired series, associated image reveries in both monochrome and colour, whose titles―The Somnambulist, Déjà-Vu, Days at Sea, and Chiaroscuro―underline the particular poetic sensibility that informs his work. Starting out in 1960 with Dorothea Lange, he made his way to New York in 1967 and was soon considered in the same light as the likes of Larry Clark and Diane Arbus. The photographs and series can of course speak for themselves. But for Gibson there is a philosophy at play behind the image, and in the included short texts he proposes his thesis. Nudes, portraits, still lives, narratives―loyal to his Leica, Gibson ranges between genres and creates new categories of vision. He gets closer to things and meditates on them in a way that only the silence of the image can attempt.Produced in close collaboration with the artist, this book offers the fruit of more than six decades of image-making. From Gibson’s first photographs in San Francisco, Hollywood, and New York in the 1960s right up to the present day, this is the most comprehensive collection of this highly acclaimed photographer.

Before The Americans redefined documentary photography, a young Robert Frank (1924–2019) arrived in the United States in 1947 with a modest yet pivotal collection of images: his first portfolio. Created to showcase his talent and secure employment, this selection of 40 photographs—taken between 1941 and 1946—offers an intimate look at the formative years of one of the 20th century’s most influential photographers.

Now reproduced in facsimile for the first time in over a decade, Portfolio captures the essence of Frank’s early vision. Rural Swiss landscapes stand alongside bustling street scenes, antique shops, fine fabrics, and the glow of cinema lights—subjects that hint at the keen observational eye that would later define his work. Also included are images Frank retouched for other photographers, revealing his technical precision.

Designed in collaboration with Gerhard Steidl, this edition stays true to Frank’s original presentation, housed in a softcover within a cardboard envelope, just as he would have stored and carried it. In many ways, Portfolio serves as his first photobook, laying the foundation for the sequencing and storytelling approaches that would culminate in masterpieces like The Americans and The Lines of My Hand. More than a collection of early work, it is a testament to the beginnings of a groundbreaking artistic journey.