To the world, his friends and in his work, David Gilkey was good-humored, loyal, brave, meticulous, at times a little manic, and deeply sensitive.
The late photojournalist documented natural disasters and wars by bringing his feet — which he called “the greatest zoom lens ever invented” — close into the lives of people.
As an NPR staff photographer, he enjoyed all the jokes about taking pictures for a radio network. Shooting stories around the world, he won numerous awards for capturing loss, struggle and even joy.
As he watched a war-torn Afghanistan change around him, he wrote in 2013, “I photographed the little things I had stopped seeing.”
While on assignment there in June 2016, David and his interpreter, Zabihullah Tamanna, were ambushed and killed by the Taliban.
A new book of David’s photographs, titled Pictures on the Radio, memorializes both his work, and David himself, through memory-filled essays from several of his former NPR colleagues, closing with an afterword by his mother Alyda Gilkey.
“All of his pictures seem to have a story,” Alyda told NPR. “I think that was a part of the magic of his photographs.”
