Dallas Morning News wins photo Pulitzer

Prize is Texas' first in 10 years

The photos say a lot and that translates into a Pulitzer Prize.

It has been 10 years since a Texas newspaper won a Pulitzer but The Dallas Morning News ended the drought April 5 when photographers David Leeson and Cheryl Diaz Meyer won the 2004 prize for breaking news photography.

Fittingly the News was the last Texas newspaper to win, claiming the 1994 Pulitzer for international reporting with a team of reporters. The 2004 Pulitzer is the News’ seventh but the first for both Meyer and Leeson who has been a finalist twice.

Leeson and Meyer won for “their eloquent photographs depicting both the violence and poignancy of the war with Iraq,” according to the citation.

Both were embedded with American troops during the invasion, Meyer with the Second Tank Battalion of the First Marine Division out of Camp Lejeune, N.C. and Leeson with the U.S. Army 3rd Infantry Division, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, Task Force 269 Armored out of Fort Benning, Ga.

Leeson was with the troops for six weeks and saw 23 days of sustained enemy contact in frontline action. Meyer returned to cover the aftermath in Baghdad. Their 20 telling photographs can be viewed on the Pulitzer Web site at www.pulitzer.org.

“I feel nothing but humility,” Leeson said in an April 6 story in the News announcing the prize. “Humility because I know I’m the sum total of all of you,” he told the newsroom.

A News senior staff photographer since 1984, Leeson thanked the staff, the corporation and his wife and family.

“I also thank the commander of Task Force 269, who gave me the freedom to actually do my job and showed the world what a free press is about,” Leeson said.

Meyer thanked her husband “who throughout all of this held together when I barely could” and her family and the News staff photographers and photo editors “who put up with me being gone for so long and for supporting me.” Meyer joined the News in 2000.

Leeson’s work from Iraq, which included still and video, received recognition in The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Time and Newsweek, and MSNBC, ABC and CSPAN. His video was featured on ABC’s “World News Tonight.”

Leeson was a Pulitzer finalist in 1994 for a photograph of a family evacuating floodwaters in southeast Texas and in 1985 for his photo coverage of apartheid in South Africa.

Meyer’s work from Iraq was published in The New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek and Spiegel magazines, and MSNBC, ABC News and CSPAN.