Deepwater Horizon oil spill

Charlie Riedel's oiled bird photographs, Louisiana, June 2010 In early June, Riedel photographed birds mired in thick crude from the BP spill on the Louisiana coast. His pictures for the Associated Press quickly became some of the best-known images of the disaster, and the oil-covered pelicans became its symbols. The picture shown here is a wildlife service photo of another oiled pelican from the spill, not one of Riedel's frames. The impact reached the hearing room: Representative Steve Scalise held up one of Riedel's pelican photographs while questioning BP's chief executive, Tony Hayward, in Congress. For a spill that began far offshore and largely out of sight, these pictures supplied what the public could not otherwise see.