Corinne Dufka

Career

After finishing her master's degree, Corinne Dufka began her career as a humanitarian volunteer and social worker across Latin America. She helped Nicaraguan refugees during that country's revolution and assisted survivors of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake. She then relocated to El Salvador, working as a social worker for the Lutheran church. There, she grew close to local photojournalists.

The director of a human rights organization asked her to start a program using photography to document abuses. Two weeks later, that director was killed, reportedly by death squads. Dufka's photographs of his body appeared in The New York Times, and she took the job.

Photojournalism

In 1989, she landed her first photojournalism contract with Reuters, covering the conflict in El Salvador. In 1992, she moved to Sarajevo to document the ethnic conflicts in the Balkans. She stayed in the region until 1993, when the vehicle she was riding in hit an anti-tank mine. The blast left her with facial lacerations, internal injuries, and ligament damage.

After three weeks recovering in London, she went back to work for Reuters in Mogadishu, Somalia. She remained based in East Africa, covering much of the continent, including the Rwandan genocide. Her images from Rwanda were later used as evidence at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. She also documented famine in Sudan, conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Liberian civil war.

In 1998, Dufka traveled to Nairobi, Kenya to cover the bombing of the American Embassy. She arrived just hours after the explosion and felt deep frustration at having missed the story. Later, while watching news coverage of the attack, she realized she had lost compassion for the people she photographed.

Human rights

That realization led her to decide to leave photojournalism. In 1999, she left Nairobi to establish a field office for Human Rights Watch in Freetown, Sierra Leone, where she documented abuses during the country's civil war. In 2002, she took a leave of absence to serve as a criminal investigator for the Chief of Investigations and the Prosecutor at the United Nations' Special Court for Sierra Leone.

Did You Know?

• She received a bachelor's degree from San Francisco State University in 1979.
• She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a master's degree in social work in 1984.