“Nobody is talking about the losers. Moving forward, we decided to look at these stories from the eyes of the loser.”
Marcus Yam, Pulitzer-prize winning photojournalist speaking at Sir Harry Summit 2026 on taking a fresh approach and looking at the news from a fresh perspective.
Watch the full conversation at sirharrysummit.org
@yamphoto@globeandmail
#sirharrysummit
#pressfreedom
This Sunday: “Body and Mind in the Field: Safety for Visual Journalists” Webinar
Don’t miss your chance to join Lauren Walsh and Marcus Yam this Sunday, November 16 from 12 pm - 1:30 pm ET for “Body and Mind in the Field: Safety for Visual Journalists,” a free webinar hosted by the Eddie Adams Workshop and the W. Eugene Smith Foundation. Hear from two leading voices whose work connects journalism, safety, and mental health.
This free event is open to everyone. Please RSVP at the link in our bio, or join with the Zoom link below:
https://zoom.us/j/97637014470
Date: November 16, 2025 12 pm - 1:30 pm ET
Photograph by Maxim Dondyuk, 2022 W. Eugene Smith Fund Grant Recipient. @maximdondyuk
This Veterans Day, please join me in honoring the service and sacrifice of South Vietnam’s often-forgotten soldiers and civil servants.
Earlier this year in Seattle’s Little Saigon, we organized Portraits of Resilience — a day of storytelling, community archiving, and portrait-making to recognize these living elders and share their legacies with future generations. Guided by Pulitzer Prize–winning photojournalist @yamphoto , a local photography team led by Truong Nguyen created powerful images of resilience and pride. Storytelling circles were facilitated by Dr. Tam Dinh, with the support of dedicated volunteers.
We are deeply grateful to the partners and supporters who made this gathering possible:
✨ @kc4culture — This project was supported, in part, by a 4Culture grant.
✨ @flsseattle – Co-hosted and helped us access and hold the event at Nisei Veterans Memorial Hall.
✨ City of Seattle’s SmART Ventures – Provided us with a small, meaningful grant.
✨ Tamarind Tree and veteran @dedelytran – Generously provided the food that brought us together.
These portraits and stories remind us that the fight for freedom did not end in 1975 — it continues through memory, community, and the resilience passed down across generations. With more support, we hope to hold space like this again.
📸 Color photos: Khoi Duong
📷 B&W portraits: @truongwin_ & our amazing team
Webinar on Safety for Visual Journalists
You’re invited to join Lauren Walsh and Marcus Yam on Sunday, November 16 from 12 pm - 1:30 pm ET for “Body and Mind in the Field: Safety for Visual Journalists,” a free webinar hosted by the Eddie Adams Workshop and the W. Eugene Smith Foundation.
This session offers a comprehensive look at how photographers can stay safe—physically and psychologically—while working in today’s unpredictable media landscape. Learn practical strategies for assessing risks, preparing equipment, and responding under pressure, as well as tools for managing stress, trauma exposure, and burnout. A PDF of key takeaways and resource links will be shared after the event. No recording will be made.
Please RSVP at the link in our bio, or join with the Zoom link below:
https://zoom.us/j/97637014470
Date:
November 16, 2025 12 pm - 1:30 pm ET
Photograph by Maxim Dondyuk, 2022 W. Eugene Smith Fund Grant Recipient. @maximdondyuk
Marcus Yam is an award-winning foreign correspondent and photojournalist for the Los Angeles Times.
In 2019, Marcus spoke with us about being on-the-scene during serial California wildfires, and the sensitivity that is essential when documenting tragic events.
This fall, he'll spend two semesters at Harvard as a Nieman Fellow, exploring new frameworks for covering war and fostering empathy.
Alice Kisiya points towards her family’s land behind closed gates as Israeli security forces block their way after Jewish settlers forcibly took over the property while disputing legal ownership over the land in the Al-Makhrur, in Beit Jala, Occupied West Bank, Thursday, Aug. 1, 2024.
The front gate was rammed in and replaced with a new one with a blue Star of David attached. The Kisiya family insists and presents land registration documentation that they have owned and purchased the land legally since 1967.
On that day, Alice and her family members and activists managed to enter their land to continue to protest what they say is rightfully theirs. Israeli soldiers sealed entry and exit to stop others from entering. As night fell, Israeli security quelled the protests with stun grenades and declared the area a closed military zone.
However, Israeli soldiers say the order allows for the Jewish settlers to remain on the contested land.
The Al-Makhrur area which sits in a valley near the city of Bethlehem, has turned into a hub for clashes as activists accompanying the Kisiya family return almost daily, to demonstrate against the eviction and to reclaim their home.
Meanwhile, nearby, an entire area in Al-Makhrur which has been declared by UNESCO as a World Heritage site, preserving ancient traditional agriculture, is now in danger.
Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right finance minister and a settler himself, gave preliminary approval to construct a new settlement, Nahal Heletz in June. Still, Israeli authorities signed off on it in mid-August, which will encroach on Palestinian land recognized by Unesco, according to advocacy group Peace Now.
Israeli peace activists also point out that the intention of the new settlement and its construction is part of a broader effort to disconnect Palestinian villages from Bethlehem and to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Photos by Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times
#landgrab #eviction #palestinians #Jewish #settlers #Israel #gaza #idf #hamas #israelhamaswar #palestine #war #occupiedwestbank #occupation
Valentina Guaman, 12, raised three fingers in the air and recited an oath in Spanish.
“On my honor, I will try
To serve my community and my country
To help people at all times
And to live by the Girl Scout Law.”
It had been a year and a half since Valentina and her family had fled Ecuador — trudging through a dangerous, muddy jungle to escape South America, dodging authorities in Mexico and spending cold nights in detention on the U.S. border, where immigration agents confiscated the beloved stuffed animal, Stitch, that her father gave her on her fifth birthday.
Life in New York City, where the family ended up, hadn’t been much easier. Her parents struggled to find work and the family bounced between migrant shelters and slept for a time on the sidewalk in Times Square. Valentina longed for her friends, her cats and her two older siblings back home.
But she looked forward to Thursdays, when she and other members of Girl Scout Troop 6000 would meet and — for a few hours, at least — just get to be girls.
“I feel like it’s my second home,” Valentina said. “And that they’re my second family.”
Troop 6000 is unlike any other Girl Scout group in the country.
It was launched in 2017 to serve families living in temporary housing in the New York City shelter system. Two years ago, the troop expanded to serve girls residing in an emergency migrant shelter opened to help house large numbers of asylum seekers arriving in the city.
The troop introduced the young migrants to a longtime staple of American girlhood, teaching them lessons in civics and community service — and the art of selling Samoas, Thin Mints and Tagalongs. And it offered a haven in a chaotic metropolis where asylum seekers had become the target of a heated political discourse.
Excerpts from Kate Linthicum’s story.
Photography by Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times
Read our @latimes story here.
https://lat.ms/3MkbGes
#girlscouts #troop6000 #migrants #asylumseekers #newyorkcity #manhattan #immigration #housing #shelter #photojournalism #ontheroad #dispatches #latimes #latimesphotos
Aug. 15th – Three years. After the U.S. military withdrawal. After the Taliban takeover. After the exodus. Country sanctioned. Families separated. A new world order. Fleeting tranquility. Broken promises. Mounting desperation. Mired in humanitarian crisis. Women rights denied. Progress nullified. Freedoms lost. Economic free fall. Paper money crumbling. Daily struggle constant. Uncertainty. #fallofafghanistan #taliban #takeover #afghanistan #american #military #withdrawal #photojournalism #kabul #anniversary #everydayafghanistan #latimes #latimesphotos
In a quiet corner of the Qatari capital, between an Indian restaurant and a hair salon, lies a housing compound once meant to host World Cup visitors. Instead it’s become a temporary home for about 1,500 Palestinian medical evacuees from Gaza — a micro-sized Gaza-on-the-gulf and a living catalog of the horrors inflicted on the human body by the tools of war.
There is 5-year-old Fatma Nabhan, who goes by the nickname “Battah,” or Duck. In a place where pain is ever present she was one of the few who seemed to exhibit moments of joy. She giggled, fidgeting in the chair as a volunteer painted a Spider-Man mask on her face. Then she scampered off on her one leg, hopping quickly across the room as her purse, showing a smiling Snow White, swung in her wake.
Fatma and other children are among the medical evacuees whose injuries are far too severe for Gaza’s collapsing medical system to treat, and who were brought along with some of their relatives to Doha as part of an initiative by Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani.
They’re also part of a much larger group of people wounded in Israel’s military offensive in the Gaza Strip since Oct. 7, when Hamas operatives killed roughly 1,200 people in southern Israel and took hostages. In Gaza, in addition to the more than 38,000 killed in Israel’s subsequent attacks, more than 89,000 have been wounded. In a population where nearly half are younger than 18, the majority of victims have been women and children, the ministry says. “Burns. Amputations. Head injuries. Fractures. Shrapnel. Crush injuries — we’ve never seen this severity, or this number of amputees, or such severe injuries to internal organs,” said Dr. Ahmed al Hammadi, the acting chief medical officer for Sidra Medicine in Doha that is providing some of the most complex treatments for the evacuees.
“We were told to expect that the kids are mostly amputees and have major trauma,” said Noura Al Jaber, a volunteer with the Qatar Foundation, which is offering psychological counseling among other services. “But it’s different when you come here. The reality of it hits you.”
Excerpts from story by Nabih Bulos
Photos by Marcus Yam https://lat.ms/4bRZtbp
The stage set was haunting in its stark simplicity. Panels of jagged crossbeams evoked skeletal ruins. Lengths of white fabric fluttered like shrouds.
For almost any theater troupe in the world, it would be daunting to stage a Shakespeare production in Stratford-upon-Avon — the Bard’s birthplace, home of the venerable Royal Shakespeare Company, hallowed ground to devotees of the playwright and his works.
All the more so if the players in question were amateur actors. Even more if the play happened to be “King Lear” — one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies, and also one of the thorniest and most challenging.
And finally: if the performance was entirely in Ukrainian. Without subtitles.
That’s the task a provincial Ukrainian theater company set for itself — a wartime feat that sprang from luck and determination, warm collaboration and cool nerves, taxing logistics and small, hard-won triumphs over trauma.
Outside, a soft rain fell. Inside, a storm raged. On a stylized heath, the mad king howled his wounded howl.
“Blow, winds!” shouted actor Andrii Khomik, as Lear. “Rage, blow!”
The amplified thunder roared. The stage all but shook. The audience sat rapt.
Twenty-four hours earlier, on the eve of Saturday night’s performance, director Viacheslav Yehorov, 51, stared down at his tightly clasped hands.
Exile and loss, battle and betrayal, disinheritance and vengeance, old age and human frailty — of all the grandeur and pathos of “King Lear,” one theme had always stood out for him.
“That without love,” he said, “we are nothing.”
Excerpts from Laura King’s beautiful writing.
Gratitude to Kelvin Kuo & Allison Hong for unique graphics.
Photography by Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times
Read our @latimes story here.
/3x6f2ybp
#kinglear #shakespeare #tragedy #drama #uk #england #theater #actor #ukraine #war #displaced #refugee #photojournalism #ontheroad #dispatches #latimes #latimesphotos
On a recent warm and balmy summer weekend, Laura King and I took a train to Clacton-on-Sea for a reporting jaunt. And in this curious place, fate had us running into Nigel Farage. Wished I could have stayed longer to explore.
Excerpts from Laura’s dispatch:
“In a sludgy, slow-motion trajectory, the pale yellow milkshake found its mark: far-right political candidate and Donald Trump acolyte Nigel Farage, on the inaugural day of his insurgent campaign for a seat in the British Parliament.
But no display of airborne voter displeasure was going to prevent one of the country’s most gleefully polarizing public figures from shaking up what had until then been considered a fairly sedate contest between Britain’s two biggest parties. In a surprise announcement in early June, Farage inserted himself as the ruling Conservatives were already forecast to lose decisively to the left-leaning Labor Party.
Some observers believe the return of Farage, 60 — political flamethrower, a key architect of Brexit, leader of a small, stridently anti-immigration party — could lead to a MAGA-like takeover of the Conservative Party, which has played a preeminent role in British politics for nearly 200 years.
Farage, who hails from a leafy village on London’s outskirts, is making his eighth parliamentary run in Clacton-on-Sea, a down-at-the-heels seaside town whose jangling arcades, shuttered storefronts and scruffy, darting seagulls can lend it the air of a distorted funhouse mirror. (In Britain, parliamentary candidates do not have to live in their constituencies.)
“Something is happening out there — momentum!” Farage recently told a group of sweaty, enthusiastic supporters at his tiny local headquarters, situated above one of the many garish amusement arcades lining a seaside street.
“It’s like millions of simultaneous conversations are going on, at the breakfast table, at the bingo hall, at the pub — ‘Oh my God, we were just talking about you!’” he said, sounding almost giddy.
Photography by Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times
Read our @latimes story here.
https://lat.ms/45Q2QOx
#UK #elections #england #britain #photojournalism #ontheroad #dispatches #latimes #latimesphotos
