Pulitzer Prize Finalist

The 2008 Pulitzer Prizes were announced Monday and I was happy to learn that the last big project I worked on at The Charlotte Observer was a finalist for the 2008 Gold Medal for Public Service.
As the lead photographer on a team of editors and reporters, I was heavily involved from the onset of the project. I worked extensively to find the best visual approach to the story until I left the paper in January 2007.
The series, "Sold a Nightmare", focused on the area's high rate of housing foreclosures and questionable sales practices by one of the nation's largest homebuilders. See the Observer's article about the award here.
My challenge initially was to make interesting images from situations that weren't very visually compelling. We found a few families that we focused on to put a human face on the issue.
The Washington Post won the award for a series that exposed mistreatment of wounded veterans at Walter Reed Hospital. Newsday was the third finalist for its investigation into a railroad's safety hazards.
The Observer's project was far-reaching and took more than a year to complete. Observer photographers Todd Sumlin, Diedra Laird, Yalonda M. James and Dana Romanoff all worked on the series.
Congratulations to the winners of the Pulitzer's photography awards - Adrees Latif of Reuters for Breaking News Photography and Preston Gannaway of the Concord (N.H.) Monitor for Feature Photography.