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COMING HOME: Michel du Cille during a visit to a Wynwood
restaurant in Miami in 2013.
Photo by Al Diaz
Michel du Cille’s former colleague remembers the
day the three-time Pulitzer Prize photographer learned his trade by fire.
“Michel arrived at the Miami Herald as an intern on
the day of the McDuffie riots and went out into Liberty City and ended up
photographing a car wreck where a little girl was injured and lost one leg and
it was very hard on him,” said retired photojournalist Mary Lou Foy, who worked
with du Cille at the Herald and later at the Washington Post.
“His mother had died in the last couple months and
here’s this kid, still wet behind the ears, and bam! He gets some of the
worst stuff going.”
Through some of life’s worst moments — and its most
newsworthy — du Cille captured the humanity through his lens. The Washington
Post photojournalist died Thursday while on assignment in Liberia chronicling
Ebola patients. He was 58.
According to the Post, du Cille collapsed after a
strenuous hike. He was transported over dirt roads to a hospital two hours away
but was declared dead on arrival of an apparent heart attack.
“Michel, you can’t say too much good about him,”
Foy said. “He just really was a fine man and had it all. Love in his heart and
a dedicated photojournalist who wanted the truth to be known.’’
Washington Post photo editor Joe Elbert was in the
same position at the Herald when he sent the eager intern out onto the Miami
streets in May 1980.
“I gave him a beat-up camera … and he took off and
disappeared for two days covering the riots. I told people, ‘I think I killed
the intern, and he’s not even starting on the clock until Monday. What do I
do?’ He surfaced two days later with these really incredible pictures where
he’d gotten into Overtown and Liberty City,” Elbert told the Post.
Bill Cooke recalled when the two were on assignment
in October 1986 — Cooke freelancing for The Associated Press, du Cille working
for the Herald — when members of the Yahweh religious sect took over an
Opa-locka apartment complex. Two of the residents were shot and killed.
“I remember having an exchange with somebody but
Michel, he was just, ‘Calm down. We’ll get through this.’’’
Pulitzer-winning Miami Herald photographer Patrick
Farrell, whose work was featured with du Cille’s in an exhibition earlier this
year of Pulitzer Prize-winning photos at Florida International University’s
Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum, believes that is one reason du Cille
excelled.
“He showed that kind of eagerness to listen and
to record,” Farrell said. “I remember in the the late ’80s I was working for
the South Dade News Leader and I saw his crack story and I was like, ‘Holy
smokes. How did this photographer do this?’ First of all, they were amazing
images but how did this photographer get this kind of access and really gain
the trust of these people in such a tough situation?”
Du Cille gained the trust of his fellow
photographers, many
of whom he mentored.
“He wanted young photographers to pass him and I
think that’s the biggest contribution he left because that requires a lot of
unselfish thought. When I came to the Herald, Mike was one of the few black
photographers working and he set the bar up pretty high,” Herald photographer
Carl Juste said. “He continued to do the stories most people would say ‘no’ to.
He always held the idea that if you are not willing to bear witness, who else
would? He was the standard; he was the line.’’
And he wanted to make sure the world saw the
communities often overlooked.
“He knew the importance of imagery as it pertained
to people of color and under-served communities,’’ Juste said. “If we could be
truthful to our message we couldn’t be exploited. I think that’s why he went to
shoot Ebola [patients.] It was not to cover a disease but to dismantle myths
and taboos. … that takes a strong person.”
Du Cille won his first Pulitzer for spot news
photography in 1986 — which he shared with then-Miami Herald photographer Carol
Guzy, who also later moved to The Post — for their coverage of a devastating
Colombian volcano.
“He was my closest friend; I’m heartbroken,” Guzy
said. “We started together as interns and it’s been a long journey.”
On a Facebook post, Guzy wrote, “Beloved Michel du
Cille — a man of decency, integrity, dignity and grace. … Michel called from
Africa the day my sister passed and expressed regret that he couldn't be here
for me. That was the kind of person we all lost.”
In 1988, du Cille won his second Pulitzer in
feature photography. He spent months photographing life inside a crack house in
Miami on the corner of Northeast Second Avenue and 71st Street, then commonly
referred to as “The Graveyard.”
“He would spend days there at this horrible place
and he had huge empathy for his subjects. He always put their humanity and
their story ahead of what he was doing with his pictures,” said Newsday
multimedia producer Chuck Fadely, who worked in the Herald’s darkroom poring
over du Cille’s photographs.
In 2008, 20 years after leaving the Herald and
joining the Post, he shared his third Pulitzer, with Post reporters Dana Priest
and Anne Hull, for an investigative series on the mistreatment of an Iraq war
veteran at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
Du Cille worked at The Post as an assistant
managing editor for several years, battled cancer, and returned to his first
love — photography.
Michelangelo Everard du Cille was born Jan. 24,
1956, in Kingston, Jamaica. At 16, while still in high school, he began his
photography career at the Gainesville Times in Georgia. He interned at the
Louisville Courier-Journal in Kentucky and the Miami Herald before graduating
from Indiana University in 1981. He received a master’s degree in journalism
from Ohio University in 1994 while at the Post.
His assignments at the Post often took him to
places of strife and deprivation, from Sudan to Afghanistan, where he came
under fire in 2013, the paper reported. He covered civil wars in Liberia and
Sierra Leone in the 1990s before returning to west Africa this year to cover
the Ebola outbreak.
“It is profoundly difficult not to be a feeling
human being while covering the Ebola crisis,” du Cille wrote in The Post in
October. “Sometimes, the harshness of a gruesome scene simply cannot be
sanitized. … The story must be told; so one moves around with tender care,
gingerly, without extreme intrusion.”
Survivors include his wife Nikki Kahn, a Washington
Post photographer, and two children from his first marriage, Leighton du Cille
and Lesley Anne du Cille.
This story was supplemented by The Washington Post. Follow @HowardCohen on Twitter.
Steve Dozier, Joe Elbert, Michel du Cille and Carol Guzy, left to right, during the Miami Herald staff and family reunion in 2013 in Miami. Photo by Marice CohnBand
Final days of the old Miami Herald building on the bay. Marice CohnBand is carried by Steve Dozier, Joe Elbert, David Walteres, Michel du Cille, Carol Guzy and Bruce Gilbert. Photo by F. Stop Fitzgerald
Reunion on the bay with Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald staff, past and present. Photo by F. Stop Fitzgerald.
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Think Tank Photo
Saturday, December 13, 2014
Pulitzer-winning photojournalist Michel du Cille dies at 58
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