Egyptian Pulitzer prize-winning photographer speaks of war's scars - and blessings

Photography makes a person tough and soft at once, says Nariman El-Mofty

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  Nariman El-Mofty is a Pullitzer Prize-winning Egyptian-Canadian photographer whose work is focused on struggles for survival. She photographed Azizah Rageh, 25, a severely undernourished Yemeni woman entering the second trimester of pregnancy, at a hospital in Aden in February 2018. All images: Nariman El-Mofty/ AP Photo

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  Ahmed El-Benawy, living with HIV in 2017, wears his late mother's diamond ring as he poses for El-Mofty at his home in Cairo

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  A woman makes her way in the market town of Ibb, south-western Yemen, in 2018, the third year of conflict between the recognised government and Houthi rebels

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  Sawda Mohammed Khalil waits for treatment at the Al Khokha Hospital in Yemen in February 2018. Doctors estimated 40 per cent of the children in the town suffered malnutrition

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  February 9, 2018 in Abyan, Yemen: Hagar Yahia holds her daughter Awsaf, a thin five-year-old who is getting no more than 800 calories a day from bread and tea, half the normal amount for a girl her age

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  Nine-month-old Galila is treated for malnutrition and malaria at the Nutrition Stabilisation Centre in Khokha in February 2018

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  In Marib on July 27, 2018, Kahlan Saleh Amer, 12, demonstrates how to use a rifle at a camp for displaced persons

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  St Mark's Cathedral in Cairo following the December 11, 2016 attack on Coptic Christians claimed by ISIS that killed dozens of people

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  Boys at prayer at the Rehabilitation Of Children Recruited and Impacted By War in Yemen project centre in Marib in July 2018

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  Ethiopian migrants are taken to a lock-up known in Arabic as a 'hosh' by smugglers in Ras Al Ara, Lahj, south-western Yemen in July 2019. Nearly every migrant who lands is imprisoned while their families are shaken down for money. Women are subjected to daily torments ranging from beatings and rapes to starvation. Of every thousand, 800 men and women disappear in the lockups, said one humanitarian worker

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  The tomb of Sarah, the wife of Prophet Abraham, in the Ibrahimi Mosque in the old city of Hebron in the West Bank, Palestine, in April 2016

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  An emaciated Ethiopian Tigrayan who had been imprisoned by traffickers for months is attended by a nurse at the Ras Al Ara Hospital in Lahj, Yemen, on August 1, 2019. Staff gave him fluids but he died hours later

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  In this Aug. 1, 2019 photo, 19-year-old Ethiopian migrant Mohammed Hussein, who is severely malnourished due to imprisonment by smugglers and abuse, weighing only 31 kilograms (68 pounds) stands on a scale, at the Ras al-Ara Hospital in Lahj, Yemen. Starvation is a punishment used by the traffickers to wear down their victims. Hussein and three others arrived at the hospital with their bones protruded from their backs, their rib cages stood out sharply. With no fat on their bodies, they sat on rolled-up cloth because it was too painful to sit directly on their bones. AP Photo / Nariman El-Mofty

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  Tigrayan refugees who fled the conflict in Ethiopia's Tigray ride a bus to the Village 8 temporary shelter, near the Sudan-Ethiopia border, in Hamdayet, eastern Sudan, on December 1, 2020

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  On August 4, 2019, photo, Yemenis, on the right, chew qat, while Ethiopian migrants, left, take shelter in a small shack at a qat market in Dhale governorate, where migrants rest before continuing their journey to Saudi Arabia

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  Yemenis at a market in Dhale governorate. Many migrants there undertake a dangerous journey across Yemen, a country torn by civil war, to get to Saudi Arabia

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  On August 1, 2019, Ethiopian migrants Gamal Hassan, Abdu Yassin, Mohammed Hussein, and Abdu Mohammed, who had been imprisoned and starved by traffickers for months, fed once a day with scraps of bread and a sip of water, pick rice from a bowl at Ras Al Ara Hospital in Lahj, Yemen

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  Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem's Old City on April 18, 2016

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  An Ethiopian Oromo migrant poses for a photograph at the ruins of the 22nd May Soccer Stadium in Aden, on July 21, 2019

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  The brother of Ahmed Mohsen, who lost a leg to a land mine, wipes his face at Marib General Hospital in Yemen on July 25, 2018

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  Boys stand for a photograph by the wreck of a van on a mountain in Ibb, Yemen, on August 3, 2018

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  A Tigrayan woman who fled the conflict in Ethiopia's Tigray region stretches after Sunday Mass at Umm Rakouba refugee camp in Qadarif, eastern Sudan, on November 29, 2020

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  Tigrayan women who fled the conflict in Ethiopia's Tigray region, pray during Sunday Mass at a church near Umm Rakouba refugee camp in Qadarif, eastern Sudan, on November 29, 2020

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  Ethiopian migrants make their way in line to embark on a boat at the coast outside the town of Obock, the shore closest to Yemen, in Djibouti, East Africa, on July 15, 2019

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  At Ras Al Ara Hospital, Lahj, Yemen, on July 26, 2019, Ethiopian Fadya Mohammed lies on a wheeled stretcher after disembarking from a boat and feeling sick from the journey

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  People who refuse to leave their homes wait in line for food aid from Kramatorsk City Council, eastern Ukraine, on July 7, 2022

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  On July 18, 2022, a funeral procession is held on the outskirts of Pokrovsk, eastern Ukraine, for Anna Protsenko, 35, killed in a Russian rocket attack

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  In Lviv, western Ukraine, Zlata-Maria Shlapak, eight years old, an internally displaced person from Kharkiv, and her puppy Letti take to the bathtub in their flat as an air raid siren sounds on April 2, 2022

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  Five-year-old Tigrayan refugee Micheale Gebremariam plays with jewellery belonging to his deceased mother, Letay, inside the family's shelter in Hamdayet, eastern Sudan, near the border with Ethiopia, on March 14, 2021

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  Men who fled the conflict in Ethiopia's Tigray region watch news on a television at the Umm Rakouba refugee camp in Qadarif, eastern Sudan, on December 5, 2020

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  At Hamdayet Transition Centre near the Sudan-Ethiopia border in eastern Sudan on December 15, 2020, Tigrayan Abrahaley Minasbo, 22, a trained dancer from Mai-Kadra, shows wounds from machetes he says were inflicted by a pro-government militia five weeks earlier

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  July 6, 2022: Pensioner and widower Valerii Ilchenko, 70, who lives alone and refuses to leave, tunes in to the news on his television at his flat in Kramatorsk, eastern Ukraine

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  Refugees who fled the conflict in Ethiopia's Tigray region ride a bus going to the Village 8 temporary shelter, near the Sudan-Ethiopia border, in Hamdayet, eastern Sudan, on December 1, 2020

Yemen was Nariman El-Mofty’s first war.

Everything was a shock, the Egyptian photojournalist says of her first trip to the war-scarred nation in 2018, from civilian casualties and starving children to child soldiers and widows left to fend for themselves.

“Hunger was very new to me. In Yemen, children who starved silently were the biggest shock,” El-Mofty, 35, recalled about her Yemen assignments between 2018 and 2020 that won her the first of two Pulitzer Prizes.

“No one cried or screamed. Children normally react and make sure that everyone knows if something is bothering them. A child that is not reacting to anything was very shocking to me.”

El-Mofty encountered silence again in the middle of another war, this time among the elderly in Ukraine.

Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Nariman El-Mofty on assignment for the Associated Press in Yemen. Photo: Nariman El-Mofty

“In Donbass, in eastern Ukraine, elderly people also suffer in silence, but alone. People in their 80s sit still and silent while the bombing goes on around them. They just sit still waiting for death to come and take them,” El-Mofty told The National.

She won her second Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022, in the category of breaking news photography, and was a finalist in the feature photography category, sharing the honours in both cases with a team of Associated Press photographers.

She travels to New York next month for the award ceremony.

Covering wars is the dream of many journalists, who are driven to take risks in exchange for making a name for themselves. In most cases, as El-Mofty discovered, the challenges they face in the war zone – personal safety, logistics and keeping combatants at an arm’s length – are replaced by others when they leave.

Nariman El-Mofty on assignment in Ukraine. Photo: Nariman El-Mofty

“You leave with a bit of guilt. But you need to be mature about it. It takes time to separate one’s life from what you do. I am still working on this, but it’s eating me up,” said El-Mofty, who resigned from AP this year and is now freelance.

“It’s in the back of my mind every time I eat,” she said about photographing starving children in Yemen.

“It touches you and becomes part of you. In some ways, it also defines who you are.

“As hard as it [war photography] makes you, it also makes your heart bigger. It has changed the way I see children, the elderly and mothers. I have become softer in many ways.”

A graduate of Montreal’s Concordia University, El-Mofty began working for the AP in Cairo in 2011 as a photo desk editor, spending up to 10 hours a day, five days a week, editing about 100 images from across the Middle East daily.

In a busy and noisy newsroom dealing at the time with an avalanche of stories on the Arab uprisings, she was almost invisible – glued to her screen and her voice rarely heard.

She may have been biding her time.

“In those days, I spent my weekends photographing daily life in Cairo. I did the camel market, the Khan El Khalili bazaar, the circus and the city’s medieval quarter,” she said. She showed her photos to her boss and mentor at the time, veteran French-Iranian photographer Manoocher Deghati.

“He would look at them and explain where I went wrong or where I could have done better. After a few months he began to use some of them,” she said.

Zlata-Maria Shlapak, 8, sits in a bathtub with her 9-month-old puppy Letti as an air siren goes off in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, where her family rented a flat after fleeing from Kharkiv, on April 2, 2022, just days after Russian forces invaded Ulraine. Nariman El-Mofty / AP

Slowly, she began to be given photo assignments – nothing very exciting or potentially prize-winning at first, but El-Mofty was happy to spend time away from her desk.

For Yemen, the first big story of her career, she was joined by reporter Maggie Michael, also an Egyptian, and Yemeni video-journalist Maad El Zikrey.

The three of them travelled widely in southern Yemen, experiencing the ravages of the war between the internationally-recognised government supported by a Saudi-led alliance and the Shiite Houthi rebels backed by Iran.

The first of her three trips to Yemen came in 2018, the year after El-Mofty lost her father, with whom she was very close.

He died at the age of 62 from cancer.

The loss was hard to take for El-Mofty, the youngest of three siblings.

“Everything I wanted to do I did to impress him. That remains unchanged today,” she said.

“He helped me thicken my skin in this industry. He never got me a camera until he was sure beyond a shred of doubt that I was serious about photography,” she said. “He was very tough.”

To be a capable field photographer, El-Mofty found, more than thick skin was needed.

“I was slow even though I was not carrying any gear,” she said about a drill she was put through in a hostile environment training course that simulated a hand-grenade explosion. “I was supposed to run as fast as I could in the opposite direction then lay down with my mouth open. But I was very slow.”

In this August 1, 2019 photo, 19-year-old Ethiopian migrant Mohammed Hussein, severely malnourished after imprisonment and abuse by smugglers, stands on a scale at the Ras al-Ara Hospital in Lahj, Yemen. Nariman El-Mofty / AP Photo

Her response was to take up rigorous workouts, including weightlifting, so she was able to move easily and quickly while taking photos and carrying 12 or 15 kilos of cameras and equipment on her back.

But that was not all.

Photography is dominated by men; war news photography much more so.

El-Mofty did everything she could to avoid appearing frail, emotional or weak-willed to her male peers. At times she covered up illness, even great pain, for fear of being sidelined or sent home.

“I put a lot of effort into that. I may have taken it to extremes. At the end, I hurt myself and it didn’t matter much,” she said.

“I became good at faking toughness, and I kind of sacrificed my physical wellness in the process.”