Issue date: 1/26/07 Section: News

Pulitzer Prize winning photographer for the Dallas Morning News, Michael Mulvey, walks beside a U.S. soldier down a street in Biloxi, Miss. littered with the destruction resulting from the Katrina hurricane of 2005. To see Mulvey's photos got to http://www.pulitzer.org.

Photojournalist Michael Mulvey, Class of 1994, was south of Baghdad photographing the Fourth Infantry out of Fort Hood when he got the news in April 2006.

He, along with a team of seven other photojournalists from the Dallas Morning News, had just won a Pulitzer Prize for their work covering Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana and Mississippi.

Mulvey, the lone photographer in Mississippi, said that, compared to the other disasters he had covered, Katrina was "odd," to put it mildly.

"I would say on a scale of things I've done previously, they start to all run together, but with this, (it) is hard for any one picture or any combination of pictures to express how messed up that area was," Mulvey said. "You're kind of numb to it. If there was a house in College Station that was burned down, you would notice something different on the landscape; but there, everything was destroyed."

Mulvey will speak at 6 p.m. Sunday in Cain Hall about his Pulitzer Prize and will present an in-depth slideshow of photographs of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the weeks following the hurricanes.

Being in Mississippi instead of Louisiana after Katrina was also an experience that Mulvey will never forget.

"It was odd covering Mississippi," Mulvey said. "The whole state, from the coast to a quarter mile up, was completely destroyed. They had just as much damage as New Orleans, but New Orleans had indigent people living in the Superdome, and that overshadowed the story in Mississippi in a lot of ways."

Chris Wilkins, one of Mulvey's photo editors at the Dallas Morning News, said covering Mississippi was one of the biggest stories in Mulvey's career.

"One thing that has always made Michael stand out is his versatility," Wilkins said. "In my mind, Mississippi was a culmination of all the skills that he gathered. In other words, he was on the biggest story of his life. He was completely by himself and completely up to his own in finding stories. New Orleans was relatively easy because there was so much reporting on it, but also relatively forgotten, and that was Michael's challenge. He had to find the story himself and he was really on his own."

Continued...

Page 1 of 2 next >

Article Tools