BIO

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OVERVIEW OF THE PRIZE

I need to tell you about a photograph.

In 1972, Associated Press photographer Nick Ut took a picture of a nine-year-old Vietnamese girl running naked down a road, her clothes burned off by a napalm attack, her mouth open in a scream the camera couldn’t record. That photograph won the Pulitzer Prize. It helped end a war. It became one of the most famous images in the history of photojournalism. The girl’s name was Phan Thi Kim Phuc, and she spent the next fifty years being recognized, stopped, pointed at, and asked to relive the worst moment of her life by strangers who saw her not as a person but as a symbol.

I thought about that for a long time. Not about the photograph—about her. About what it’s like to be the person inside the frame. To have your worst moment preserved in silver halide and published in every newspaper on the planet. To be nine years old and screaming and have that scream become the thing the world knows you for. Does she hate the image? Does she look at it? Does she wish the photographer had put the camera down and picked her up instead?

I’m a filmmaker. I spent more than twenty years in Los Angeles directing and producing independent features, from my directorial debut of 17 & Under (which won multiple awards) to projects that ended up on Amazon Prime Video, Starz Channel and Tubi TV. I know what a camera does to people. I know what it feels like to point a lens at someone and take something from them—their image, their moment, their privacy—and turn it into a product. I’ve spent my career thinking about the ethics of looking, about what the person behind the camera owes the person in front of it. And I’ve never found a satisfying answer.

THE PRIZE is my attempt to sit with the question instead of answering it. It’s a novel about a photograph taken in the aftermath of a school bombing—a photograph that wins the Pulitzer Prize and destroys the four people inside it. A firefighter carrying a dead boy. A thirteen-year-old girl standing beside them, bleeding and screaming. A mother who will never hold her son again. And the photographer who pressed the shutter and spent the rest of his life wishing he hadn’t.

The novel grew out of that question about Kim Phuc, but it became something else—a story about how a single image can mean completely different things to the people inside it. The firefighter sees his guilt. The mother sees her grief. The girl sees herself, frozen in a moment she can’t escape. The photographer sees the thing that made him famous and the thing that ruined him. Same photograph. Four different prisons.

I wrote this novel because I’m the person who’s been on both sides of the camera. I’ve directed actors through their most vulnerable moments and then called “cut” and moved on to the next setup while they sat in a chair and tried to reassemble themselves. I’ve pointed a lens at real people in real pain for documentary work and felt the pull between empathy and composition—between the human response to help and the professional instinct to frame. That tension is the engine of this novel. Demian Ochoa is not me. But the thing that haunts him—the question of whether the camera heals or harms, whether bearing witness is an act of service or an act of theft—is the question I’ve carried through twenty years of making images.