Fall 2024: 2 minutes with Gregory Bull
ÌýÌýGregory Bull (Jour'91)
Associated Press photographer
Bull started covering the U.S.-Mexico border as a newspaper photographer in 1994. In May, he was part of an AP team that won a Pulitzer Prize for how they covered migrants’ journeys into the United States.
ÌýÌýWhere is this photo set?
Hundreds of asylum seekers were caught between Tijuana and San Diego in 2023, when the pandemic-era health order that allowed the United States to turn away migrants at the border expired.
This picture was taken as migrants started to realize there were not enough donated supplies for everybody. People were frantically but politely pleading for blankets. My hope, as I shot this, was that it might convey that sense of disorder and urgency we were seeing all along the border.
ÌýÌýHow was the photo made?
A photo like this is more about connecting with people—achieving a level of trust to where you can kind of disappear and wait for those elements you need to convey that feeling of urgency. Technically, you need a wide enough angle of view to allow for a larger “stage.â€
ÌýÌýWhat makes it work?
The bars in the wall provide a dependable vertical pattern, so it was a matter of looking for diagonals to break that up. The woman’s hand at right brought this picture together. But design elements aside, I think this picture mostly works because of the look of despair on the face of the woman at center. For me, she embodied the overall emotion people were grappling with.

Malinda Miller graduated from the College of Arts and Sciences with a degree in English in 1992 and Masters in Journalism in 1998.