A young boy climbs through a hole in search of goods just days after Haiti’s earthquake. Photo by Damon Winter.

New York Times photographer Damon Winter has won the award for Newspaper Photographer of the Year at the 68th annual Pictures of the Year International competition.

Winter’s moving images, primarily of Haiti after last year’s devastating earthquake, represented for judges “a strong balance of powerful aesthetic with solid journalistic content that reflect the news events, personalities, and social issues,” contest organizers said in a press release.

Pictures of the Year International (POYi) is an annual photojournalism contest administered by the Missouri School of Journalism. Judging for this year’s competition runs through February 22, and will include prizes for portrait, editing and multimedia.

A staff photographer at the New York Times since 2007, and  the Los Angeles Times before that, Winter has won several awards over the last decade. He won the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography in 2009.

While the win is definitely a great accomplishment, another set of Winter’s photos is receiving flak from fellow photographers. Some of the images Winter took for his series “A Grunt’s Life,” which documents U.S. troops in Afghanistan, were taken using the Hipstamatic app on his iPhone. After the series placed third at Pictures of the Year International, some photojournalists claimed the recognition of iPhone photography as the death of pure photojournalism.

In his response, Winters says it’s not about the camera — it’s about the photographer.

“Each photographer uses a technique or tool that helps him or her to best tell the stories and all of their work has been acknowledged and celebrated,” he said. “None of these techniques are grounded on the idea of visual accuracy but they are effectively used to tell stories, convey ideas and to enlighten, which is the real heart of our work.”