Michel du Cille, three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, dies at 58

December 12, 2014, 8:59 AM Last updated: Friday, December 12, 2014, 1:54 PM

Michel du Cille, a Washington Post photojournalist who was a three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his dramatic images of human struggle and triumph, and who recently chronicled the plight of Ebola patients and the people who cared for them, died Thursday while on assignment for The Post in Liberia. He was 58.

AP Photo/The Washington Post, Julia Ewan

Three time Pulitzer Prize winner, Michel du Cille died Thursday Dec. 11, 2014 while on assignment chronicling Ebola patients and their caretakers for the Post in Liberia. He was 58.

He collapsed while returning on foot from a village in the Salala district of Liberia's Bong County, where he had been working on a project. He was transported over dirt roads to a hospital two hours away but was declared dead on arrival of an apparent heart attack.

Du Cille won two Pulitzer Prizes for photography with the Miami Herald in the 1980s and joined The Post in 1988. In 2008, he shared his third Pulitzer, with Post reporters Dana Priest and Anne Hull, for their investigative series on the treatment of veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

"Michel had returned to Liberia on Tuesday after a four-week break that included showing his photographs at the Addis Foto Fest in Ethiopia," Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron said in a statement to the newspaper's staff.

"We are all heartbroken. We have lost a beloved colleague and one of the world's most accomplished photographers," he said.

After serving as The Post's director of photography for several years, du Cille returned to the field in 2012 as a full-time photojournalist, the job in which he always felt most comfortable. His assignments often took him to places of strife and deprivation, from Sudan and other African countries to Afghanistan, where he came under fire in 2013.

He was renowned among journalists for his ability to peer inside the cauldron of crisis to portray the dignity and sorrow of human struggle. He believed journalists had a responsibility to show the raw truth of any situation.

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Michel du Cille, three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, dies at 58