The New York Times, by Mauricio Lima, Sergey Ponomarev, Tyler Hicks and Daniel Etter

The small rubber dinghy, overloaded with migrants, slowly sinking as it lost air, finally made it to the Greek shore at dawn. Overwhelmed by relief and shattered by the harrowing overnight voyage from Turkey, a burly and seemingly rock-solid father broke down in tears as he hugged his young daughter and son.

That moment, captured by Daniel Etter for The New York Times in the penultimate image in this entry, defined for many the human face of Europe’s biggest population movement since World War II. Indeed, it went viral, republished around the world, as documented in the Supplementary section of this entry.

For months, Etter, who took the picture on the Greek island of Kos, and three fellow Times photographers — Mauricio Lima, Sergey Ponomarev and Tyler Hicks — chronicled what began as a trickle of refugees but swelled into an exodus of biblical proportions. They scrambled across beaches, marched through fields, and clambered over barbed wire as they followed the migrants, step by step, through Europe.

Their searing, intimate images captured the scale and breadth of Europe’s migration crisis, as well as the commonplace, sometimes horrific, travails of individuals lost in a mass of humanity on the move.

In some cases, like that of a drowned woman photographed by Lima on the Greek island of Lesbos, the journey ended at Europe’s outer edge, just a few feet into what had seemed the promised land. More than 3,700 of the people who tried to make their way to Europe in 2015 lost their lives. But for more than a million others fleeing war or poverty — like the bloodied Afghan man Ponomarev photographed cradling his child during a clash with Hungarian riot police — the journey continued deep into the European Union.

For European leaders, the unstoppable flow of people threatened the Continent’s postwar order. It undercut decades of European integration and security. It stretched welfare systems, undermined their political fortunes, and fed a surge of support for xenophobic politicians.

But Times photographers gave identities to the desperate people at the center of the shrill political debates. While shunning clichés of despair, they captured the human drama of the exodus in fresh, nuanced ways.

To illustrate the daily struggles of a traumatic journey, Lima and Ponomarev attached themselves to a dozen members of an Iraqi family, the Majids, as they made their way by foot, train and bus from Greece to Sweden, more than 1,300 miles. Ponomarev began the journey, and Lima joined them in Serbia and stayed with the family for 40 days, along with a Times reporter.

After being stranded for days with the Majids at a train station in Budapest when Hungarian authorities shut down rail traffic, Lima boarded an overnight bus with them to neighboring Austria, staying awake while his fellow passengers slept. His image of sprawling, sleeping bodies displays none of the trite urgency of a typical news photo. It recalls the meticulously composed intimacy of a painting by a Flemish master.

Scorning easy shots of weeping mothers and children, Lima and Ponomarev captured the misery on the migrant trail without being mawkish or predictable. Their images never reduced refugees to abstract victims or inert symbols of hopelessness. They remained vibrant individuals struggling to control their own destiny, like the young boy photographed by Hicks as he waded ashore, stunned but determined, with an inflated inner tube around his neck.

Etter’s image of the tearful father hugging his children after their perilous journey from Turkey went everywhere. The Guardian described it as a “heartbreaking” and overdue reminder that “many of these migrants are people not so different from ‘us.’” Interviewed later, the father, Laith Majid, said he was crying because he was so afraid, thinking “Why did I put my family through this? Why did I choose to face this death?”

Majid then gestured to Etter, the Times photographer, and added: “You should ask Daniel,” he said. “Because when he saw us, he was crying, too.”

Though all are photojournalists with years of experience covering conflict and disaster around the world, none of these hardened photographers were prepared for what they saw. Lima, a veteran of conflict zones from Afghanistan to eastern Ukraine, was shocked by the number of deaths among people simply looking for refuge in a peaceful Europe.

Stumbling on what he described as a “surreal mountain of discarded life vests, inner tubes and rubber dinghies” on a Greek beach, Lima produced a haunting image that, without sensationalism or ghoulishness, gave a chilling glimpse of the perils the migrants face. “How many dreams lie among all that fluorescent orange?” he wondered. “How many children will never see a beautiful beach sunset as purple as grapes? When are we going to stop being selective on our sorrow?”

Lima spent days patrolling a stretch of the Greek coastline that was particularly treacherous. There he photographed the drowned women “because people were dying” and he wanted to “help stop this from happening.”

Ponomarev, another veteran of war photography, followed “hungry, thirsty people who had nothing” on their long trek. Ponomarev recalled that, lacking wood for fires, one group of refugees he followed into a cornfield in Slovenia starting burning their spare clothes for heat. “Everywhere people were in need and needed something I could not provide,” he said. “All I could do was photograph them and hope this might help.”

Ponomarev was shocked by how willing some migrants were to “use their own children as an argument” by parading toddlers in front of riot police officers firing tear gas or waving babies at closed border crossings to try to gain entry. The bloodied man he photographed at the Hungarian border had taken his child into the middle of a pitched battle.

Etter said his encounter with the family on the sinking dinghy overwhelmed him more than anything else in a career that has included photographing war in Syria and Libya.

Daniel Etter, Mauricio Lima, Sergey Ponomarev and Tyler Hicks embraced the migrant experience. They brought to life its agonies, hopes and occasional triumphs. They put a face on the mothers, the fathers, the children, the families, whose desperation created Europe’s biggest political and human drama in decades. For this, we proudly nominate them for the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography.