Interview With Sergey Ponomarev

Sergey Ponomarev is best known for his photojournalism work depicting news images from wars and conflicts in the Middle East including Syria, Gaza, Lebanon, Egypt and Libya.

- Caterina Clerici

He has won many international photography awards. Most recently, he won first place in the General News category at World Press Photo for his work on the European refugee crisis and he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2015. From 2003 until 2012, he was a staff photographer at the Associated Press. He is now a freelance photographer and works frequently for The New York Times.

Caterina Clerici: How did you get started in your career as a photojournalist?

Sergey Ponomarev: I was always interested in journalism, that’s my family tradition. My father was a journalist, he was a foreign correspondent for a Soviet news agency. Somehow later I discovered I’d rather use visual language than the narrative text language. First, I could express myself better with images and when I started working with international media, I found that they could be understood by anyone in the world. Visual storytelling could be understood internationally without any translation.

CC: You started working with AP in Russia in 2003 and then you went freelance in 2012. How was the transition between getting assignments from a wire to pitching stories as a freelance journalist?

SP: That was one of the reasons why I quit the wire agency. I’m not interested in fashion or event photography, because I feel like I am sent there and I just press the button, I don’t even edit the images. There is no challenge.