Pulitzer-winning photojournalist Michel du Cille dies in Liberia on assignment

Rest in peace: Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Michel du Cille died in Thursday. Photo: Julia Ewan/Washington Post

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.

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.

Michel du Cille took this photo of Esther Tokpah in September in Monrovia, Liberia. The 11-year-old had lost both her parents to Ebola. Photo: Michel du Cille/Washington Post

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 Centre.

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"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.

A view of the Atlantic Ocean is seen from the roof of a home in the Capitol Hill area of Monrovia, Liberia. Photo: Michel du Cille/Washington Post

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.

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Pulitzer-winning photojournalist Michel du Cille dies in Liberia on assignment