Heidelberg, March 2007: Paolo Pellegrin’s As I Was Dying receives the 14th Leica European Publishers Award for Photography from the jury of European publishers of photography books. A Magnum member since 2001, Paolo Pellegrin, at 43, was given the definitive accolade by his peers – again in 2007 – with the Robert Capa Gold Medal Award, one of the highest distinctions in international photoreportage and the culmination of a long, exemplary career characterised by conviction and determination. Like colleagues Stanley Green, Philip Blenkinsop and Alex Majoli, Paolo Pellegrin typifies a generation of photoreporters who are bringing a new, ethical concern with form and content to their documenting of events. Having absorbed the essentials from such leading figures as W. Eugene Smith and Don McCullin, they are also very much aware of the (often justified) criticism directed at the genre. In Cambodia, Uganda, Kosovo and a host of other countries racked by wars and epidemics, Paolo Pellegrin is out to cover – mostly in black and white – the specificities and singularities of events, situations and faces, rather than run them together in a recurrently undifferentiated and often pointlessly attention-grabbing vision of horror. And he sets his images, ideas and approach in context too: so that we cannot remain unaware of what is going on outside the image.