“How does one cope with the images of sorrow, horror death and destruction in places like Haiti and Rawanda?
You cry. I worry about anyone who doesn’t cry.”

The Pulitzer medal for Journalism was designed in 1918 by Daniel French, the Stockbridge sculptor responsible the seated statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Monument in Washington DC.  

Carol Guzy has won four of them. 

The only other photographer with the same tally is Eugene Smith. 

Guzy and the late Eugene Smith share the celebrated company of other Pulitzer winners including: John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Ernest Hemmingway, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Stephen Sondheim Rogers and Hammerstein. Robert Frost and Eugene O’Neill also won four times - but, of course, all those awards were presented to writers. 

1986, Guzy received her first – for her photographs of the devastation in Columbia after the eruption of the volcano ‘Nevado del Ruiz’, which erupted when the population of the town of Armaro was sleeping. It buried almost all of the city in mud and debris and killed nearly 20,000 people.

In 1995 it was her pictures of the coup d’état in Haiti that won her second Pullitzer. US troops had occupied Haiti following the military coup, which ousted elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Led by General Raoul Cédras and a coven of his cronies, in the following weeks, the generals were responsible for killing an estimated 5000 of the Aristide’s supporters - men women and children. 

So where did this elfin like ex-nursing sister find the balls to poke a 21 mm wide-angle lens up their noses from a distance of around a meter! She must have put the fear of God into them – all petite 5’ 4” of her!

In 2000 Guzy, received her third Pullitzer for her intimate portrayal of the plight of the Kosovo refugees with her picture, taken in 1999 at a refugee camp for Muslims on the border with Albania, as the traumatised two year old Agim Shala is passed through the barbed wire of the perimeter fence to the safety of the waiting arms of his grandmother. In the previous months heavy fighting and bombing of Muslim areas of Kosovo, under the orders of Slobodan Miloševic, the military had murdered thousands of people, reduced Muslim homes to rubble and destroyed an entire infrastructure.

2011 marked her fourth Pulitzer, which portrayed the grief and desperation of the citizens of Haiti after the catastrophic earthquake. 

How does Carol cope with all these images of sorrow and horror in places she loves?

“You cry,” she says. “Anyone who doesn’t cry, I worry about.”