Two weeks after he won first prize in the 2012 World Press Photo contest, French photojournalist Rémi Ochlik was killed by rocket fire during a Feb. 22 military assault on the town of Homs, Syria. He was 28.
Ochlik's passion for photography began when his grandfather gave him an Olympus OM-1 film camera. After graduating from high school, he went to Paris to study photography at the Icart Photo school and began working for the Paris-based photography agency Wostok.
In 2003, at the age of 20, Ochlik got his first professional photography gig covering the riots in Haiti after the fall of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. His work in Haiti earned him the Francois Chalais Award for Young Reporters and was shown at the Visa Pour l'Image International Photojournalism Festival.
The following year he set up his own photo agency, IP3 Press, and began to cover sports, society and politics in Paris and around the world.
Throughout his brief career, he covered the French presidential election in 2007, the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2008, and the cholera epidemic and presidential elections in Haiti in 2010.
Most recently, Ochlik spent his time on the front lines of conflict, covering the "Arab Spring" revolutions of 2011-12 in Tunisia, Morocco, Libya, Egypt and Syria. His work was published in Le Monde magazine, VSD, Paris Match, Time and The Wall Street Journal.
On Feb. 12, Ochlik’s series "Battle for Libya" took first place in the general news category of the 2012 World Press Photo contest.