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Narciso Contreras (born in 1975) is a Pulitzer Prize winning photographer who focuses on conflict photography in religious communities and human nature.

Biography & Career
Narciso Contreras was born in Mexico City, where as an adult, he studied photography and philosophy.

Contreras started out as a freelancer photographer for newspapers like El Centro and Excelsior in 2010. He traveled to places like South East Asia, India and Burma. Attracted to conflict photography, he photographed cultural wars and religious wars and influences.

In August 2011, Contreras and another photojournalist, Showkat Shafi, were beaten and arrested by police officers in Nowhatta, Kashmir. Contreras and Rajesh Iyer, another photojournalist present, both claimed that Contreras had been continually beaten with canes by the police after presenting press credentials. They were both released and sent to the hospital that evening. The two had been covering a protest between demonstrators and government forces.

In September of 2012, Contreras was sent by his employer, the Associated Press, on an assignment to photograph the war in Syria. In 2013, he did work for The New York Times in Egypt, where he photographed wounded supporters of Egypt's ousted president, Mohamed Morsi.

In 2014 he was fired from Associated Press for violating ethical standards with a photograph he submitted while covering the war in Syria in 2013. After taking a picture of a Syrian rebel fighter, Contreras noticed a co-worker's video camera in the shot, edited it out, and sent it to his editor. Later, he was reviewing the photos for a contest with an Associated Press editor and when the image came up, he admitted that he edited it. The Associated Press publicly fired Contreras and removed all of his images from their photo archive. The Associated Press reviewed his previous work in search of more fabricated work, and found none.

Contreras' work was featured in the Photojournalism and Documentary Photography Festival in Queretaro, Mexico, celebrating the power of photography in 2014. Organizers of the event divided the festival into several sections reflecting the power of photography. These were: testify, reveal, find, protect, remember and celebrate. Contreras' work was exhibited to show photography's power to protect.

Contreras exhibited his work, "Syria's war: A Journal of Pain," in Srebrenica Memorial Gallery in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovnia, from December 2014 to April 2015. The exhibit reflected the pain and suffering of the citizens caught in the middle of the war.

Contreras' work has been published in by the Associated Press, The New York Times, Le Journal Dimanche, Der Spiegel, and National Geographic. He is currently based in India and works for ZUMA Press.

Awards
In 2013 Contreras and four other members of the Associated Press won the Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News Photography for their photography on the war in Syria. Contreras had six photographs included in the award-winning package. The other winners were Rodrigo Abd, Manu Brabo, Khalil Hamra and Muhammed Muheisen.