Pulitzer Prize-winning battle photographer Moises Saman offers a chat at MIT

Saman discusses protection of the wars in Syria and Sudan

By Vivian Hir

Nov. 6, 2025

On Monday, Oct. 27, Pulitzer Prize-winning battle photographer Moises Saman gave a chat at MIT about his protection of the wars in Syria and Sudan. Organized by the MIT Center for International Studies, MIT-Africa, and MIT-MENA, the occasion featured Associate Professor of Political Science Mai Hassan introducing Saman and moderating the Q&A on the finish. 

Saman has lined the Middle East for greater than twenty years, beginning with the Iraq War and the Arab Spring. His pictures has been featured in lots of publications, together with The New Yorker and The New York Times. In 2025, Saman gained the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for his highly effective black and white pictures of the Sednaya prison in Syria, the place prisoners have been tortured and killed below the Assad regime throughout the Syrian civil conflict. He was additionally a part of the crew that acquired the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his or her investigative protection of the Sudanese civil conflict. 

Saman started the speak by sharing his aim as a photojournalist: to “highlight moments of humanity and dignity” in locations with conflict and battle, since these points are usually missed and are usually not talked about in information headlines. Saman argued that the aim of pictures shouldn’t be solely to “bear witness,” but in addition to think about how historical past is portrayed, remembered, and even “erased.” 

Then, Saman offered a slideshow of haunting images he took when overlaying the wars in Syria and Sudan, which deeply affected the viewers. From the rubbles of Aleppo to a mother grieving her son who died within the conflict, the images depicted the humanitarian influence of the wars. 

Saman extensively lined the Syrian civil conflict from the revolution protests in 2011 to the event of ISIS in 2014 to the autumn of the Assad regime in 2024. When recalling his first project in Syria in 2011, Saman shared that seeing the protests in opposition to Bashar Al Assad’s regime within the metropolis of Hama felt as if “there was a rare sense of possibility [of revolution] back then.” However, the regime violently cracked down on the protests, finally resulting in the civil conflict. 

“What had begun as a popular uprising became fragmented, with foreign funding and arming different fractions, turning the war into a battlefield of competing agendas,” Saman mentioned. While the conflict’s destruction, notably of Aleppo, strongly impacted Saman, he was additionally struck by how civilians tried to “maintain a sense of continuity,” resembling by sending their youngsters to colleges in basements. 

Around 2016, Saman shifted his focus to the Syrian refugee crisis due to the elevated hazard for journalists in Syria given ISIS’s management of components of Syria on the time. Saman described the Zaatari Jordan refugee camp as an city hub the place households tried to “bring a sense of home to a place meant to be transient.” Besides refugee camps, Saman additionally documented the lives of city refugees in cities like Amman and others who launched into tough journeys to Europe. These experiences supplied Saman a glimpse of the conflict’s influence on refugees, stating that they “carried war with them into exile.” 

After spending over a decade reporting on the Syrian civil conflict, Saman left for Damascus in December 2024 to cowl the sudden collapse of the Assad regime. Pointing to one among his images of a crowd’s shock and concern, Saman recounted that he might “feel the tension in the air,” as individuals have been unsure in regards to the nation’s future. Saman later offered the harrowing images of Sednaya jail that gained the Pulitzer Prize, describing the jail as a spot not just for “physical confinement, but [also] the deliberate erasure of entire lives.” 

Saman then transitioned to his latest work in Sudan, stating that the theme of “unresolved grief” in Syria was additionally current in Sudan. In January 2024, Saman went to Sudan for the primary time to cowl the battle within the Nuba mountains, a area close to the border with South Sudan. Although the 2 fundamental nationwide armed teams are the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, the first group that controls the Nuba mountains is the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement North. 

This journey made Saman understand how tradition was a key a part of the battle within the Nuba mountains. According to Saman, the Nuba individuals come from over 50 African ethnic teams, converse dozens of languages, and follow totally different religions. Despite these variations, their Nuba identification was based mostly on their shared geography and as such, they coexisted peacefully. However, that identification has now turn out to be political, disrupting the peoples’ geographical bond. Saman argued that the Sudanese civil conflict shouldn’t be solely in regards to the battle in Khartoum, the capital metropolis of Sudan, but in addition in regards to the challenges that people throughout Sudan expertise. “It is about identity as well, the insistence of the Nuba to remain themselves, even as bombs fall and hunger spreads,” Saman mentioned. 

When Saman returned to the Nuba mountains once more in 2024, he noticed the toll of the war on the realm. People from different affected areas got here to Nuba — a area already with little meals and assets — additional straining the area. Saman confirmed many images that demonstrated the battle’s devastation, from individuals gathering bush leaves for meals to an adolescent with tears trickling down his face. “War doesn’t only kill with bombs and bullets,” Saman mentioned. “It kills slowly by starvation and neglect.” 

In 2025, Saman went again to Sudan for the third time, however this time to the Darfur and Sudanese refugee camps in neighboring Chad. On this journey, Saman documented the humanitarian penalties of the conflict, capturing pictures resembling a mother ready in line for water and a malnourished toddler mendacity on the hospital mattress. Saman said that the people he met weren’t “isolated tragedies,” however slightly a part of a disaster that has displaced thousands and thousands of individuals. 

Before he completed his presentation, Saman emphasised that pictures is not only about taking photos, but in addition about “recognizing the humanity in every story.” He confused that the “responsibility to remember” shouldn’t be solely for journalists, however slightly a collective one which needs to be carried by everybody within the viewers. 

“To remember is an act of resistance against erasure and to document is to ensure that these lives, these stories are seen,” Saman mentioned.