Obituary: Photojournalist Michel du Cille, Pulitzer winner

Photojournalist Michel du Cille, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner who recently captured compelling images of Ebola patients and their caretakers, died in Liberia while on assignment for the Washington Post. He was 58.

Executive Editor Martin Baron called du Cille "a beloved colleague and one of the world's most accomplished photographers."

The Post reported du Cille collapsed Thursday while returning on foot from a Liberian village where he'd been working on an assignment. He was taken over dirt roads to a hospital two hours away and was declared dead of an apparent heart attack.

Du Cille won two Pulitzer Prizes as a photographer with the Miami Herald in the 1980s and shared a third in 2008 as a reporter with the Post — an investigative public service series on the treatment of veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who were returning from Afghanistan and Iraq. He also spent several years as the Post's director of photography and an assistant managing editor.

Among his assignments was coverage of civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the 1990s. He returned to West Africa this year to cover the Ebola outbreak, sometimes wearing heavy rubber gloves as he took the pictures of the patients.

In October, Syracuse University pulled an invitation for du Cille to attend a fall workshop for its communications school after a student raised concerns that he'd recently been in West Africa covering the Ebola crisis. Du Cille insisted he had been symptom-free for the three weeks since his return and said he was "embarrassed and completely weirded out" by the university's decision.

"The most disappointing thing is that the students at Syracuse have missed that moment to learn about the Ebola crisis, using someone who has been on the ground and seen it up close," he said. "But they chose to pander to hysteria."

He is survived by his wife, Post photographer Nikki Kahn, and two children from a previous marriage. Arrangements were being made to bring his body to Monrovia, Liberia's capital, Information Minister Lewis Brown said Friday.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Gil Marks, a culinary historian who wrote widely on the relationship between Jewish food and Jewish culture in a manner that was both scholarly and friendly, died Dec. 5 in Jerusalem. He was 62.

The cause was lung cancer, his niece Efrat Altshul Schorr said, adding that Marks was not a smoker.

Marks studied for the rabbinate at Yeshiva University in New York, but he burrowed into Jewish culture and history more through recipe books than the Talmud. Still, some would argue that his work was, in its way, Talmudic — full of interpretive wisdom on traditional Jewish foods and the governing principles of cooking and eating them.

A writer with a wide frame of reference, Marks was as apt to cite Allan Sherman or Lenny Bruce as he was Maimonides or Sholem Aleichem. He spent a lifetime testing unusual seasonings and combinations of ingredients and in libraries poring over texts for the arcane details of food preparation.

"If you needed to know when they started eating carrots in Spain, he could tell you," William Altshul, who is married to Marks' sister Sharon, said in an interview.

He is survived by his mother, four siblings, and 56 nieces, nephews, grandnieces and grandnephews.

NEW YORK TIMES