Our Legends

The recent award of the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography to a photojournalist of Pakistani origin provides us a moment of reflection on the legacy of great Pakistani photojournalists. One name that embodies this rich legacy more than any other is F.E. Choudhry.

He was born on March 15th, 1909 to a Christian Rajput family in Sahrnpur, India. He was named Faustin Elmer by his parents. His family moved to Jhelum (now Pakistan) when Fazal Elahi was a young boy and he had his early education at Mission High School, Dalwal, Jhelum, and later graduated from F.C. College, Lahore.

Photography was his first love, which he picked up as a hobby first in those days when photography was still a cumbersome affair and, in his later years, started working as a freelance photographer while serving as a science teacher at St Anthony High School Lahore in 1934.

His first news photography was published in the Civil and Military Gazette, Lahore in 1935 and then went to freelance for, Illustrated Weekly of India, Bombay and other papers. He joined The Pakistan Times as a staff reporter in 1949 and remained associated with it until his retirement in 1973. He has worked with all the leading editors, such as Faiz A Faiz, Mazhar Ali Khan, I.A. Suleri and K. M. Asaf.

F.E. Choudhry, affectionately known as Chacha in the journalist community, is credited to have introduced innovative features to photojournalism, such as cricket action photography, pictorial and artistic studies of birds and animals in photojournalism, photographs of natural and cultural scenes, along with host of others which have become standards items of photojournalism today. For his long-standing services, he was awarded Tamgh-i-Khidmat in 1970, Pride of Performance in 1987 and the Tehrik-i-Pakistan Gold Medal in 1992.

He was Pakistan’s first serious, full-time press photographer who worked freelance until he was snapped up by Mian Iftikharuddin soon after the Pakistan Times began publishing in 1947. He stayed with the newspaper almost until its closure, through good times and bad, working in his own inimitable style and snapping pictures, many of which have come to form the pictorial history of Pakistan. Had Chacha done nothing but recorded the upheavals of the Partition and the arrival of thousands of refugees from across the newly-drawn dividing line between India and Pakistan, he would have assured himself a place in the history of pictorial journalism.

He donated the fabulous collection of matchbox labels that he and his wife had been collecting for years to the National College of Arts Archives.

F.E. Chaudhry died on his 104th birthday in 2013 in Lahore.