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It won the prestigious photo of the year award.

The photo was selected by an international jury of photojournalists, who are members of the nonprofit World Press Photo Foundation, from a list of more than 59,000 applicants.

Upon viewing the photograph, Jannel Lessing, a junior majoring in kinesiology, said Grigorian showed determination.

"He is someone who definitely wants to do something with his life," she said. "And he came from here."

Arthar Hafiz, a senior fine arts major, said he was glad to know that former SJSU students were seeking international opinions.

"It is very powerful," Hafiz said about the winning photo. "It is already telling a whole story."

Hafiz said he felt the photo showed a sense of humanity for people in the Middle East.

"They are not all terrorists," he said.

"A lot of people were around him while digging," Grigorian said. "He had been crying for about eight hours - he had gone through a lot, and he had nothing left."

Crystal Del Rosario, a junior major in liberal studies, said the photo is moving and truthful.

"It says so much without any words at all," she said.

Lessing said the photo reflected the feeling of a time in a young child's world.

"You can see it in his eyes," Lessing said. "It is devastating."

More than 100 people died there that day from the earthquake with a magnitude of 6.0 in the village of Changooreh, Iran, Grigorian said.

"I was staying about 300 miles from Tehran last summer," he said. "It took place not far from where I used to live."

Grigorian was born in Tehran in 1969. His family left at the onset of the Iranian revolution in 1979, he said.

"I am from a community of Armenians living in Iran that escaped to Los Angeles, Grigorian said. "I lived and grew up in Los Angeles and then went to school in San Jose."

His enthusiasm for photojournalism began while attending Pierce College, a community college in Los Angeles. He transferred to SJSU, completed the photojournalism program and graduated in 1998.

Grigorian first started working as a photojournalist covering the San Fernando Valley for the Los Angeles Daily News and then signed up as a freelance photojournalist with a New York agency, Polaris Images.

Jay Clendenin, an SJSU graduate from the photojournalism program, said he recently started working for Polaris Images as well. Clendenin went to work after graduation for the Hartford Courant, a newspaper in Connecticut. He and Grigorian worked hard together in school to build a photojournalism portfolio.

"I couldn't be more happy for him," Clendenin said. "We went to the Eddie Adams workshop together during our first year in the program at SJSU."

Adams is the photojournalist who took the famous picture of a South Vietnamese general shooting a Viet Cong prisoner in the head during the war.

"The most important things that students can do is enter a lot of contests, build a portfolio, go to workshops and apply for internships," Grigorian said.

One internship opportunity helped to launch his career in international photojournalism, he said.

"I won a scholarship from the Alexis Foundation for World Peace to intern as a student in a London study abroad program with the Syracuse University in New York," he said.

He said he wrote a proposal to the program about his passion for photojournalism. He was then able to move to Iran and stay with relatives while working on his project to document cultural change in Iran.

"I stayed with family last summer when I went there to work on my project on social and political issues in Iran," Grigorian said.

Steve Keegan, a graduate from the SJSU photojournalism program who now works for the Napa Valley Register, said Grigorian has a lot of ambition and passion for photojournalism.

"It takes a lot of guts to go to Iran where he could get killed when taking pictures of what he has taken pictures of," he said.

"He has been in some interesting situations," Keegan said. "One time, the Iranian police arrested him for photographing a building. He was blindfolded and interrogated just for taking a picture."

Grigorian said he wants to show what Iran is really like today.

"A lot has changed in Iran since 1979," Grigorian said. "The people just want to live life."

Grigorian said he feels he has not completed the job he wanted to do.

"I have been back twice," he said. "It's different to work and photograph people who are very suspicious of a camera. As a photojournalist, you don't ask - you document what's happening."

Grigorian explained how he takes pictures of people that might be uncomfortable with him being around. He suggested that photojournalists should not ask anyone to pose and then take a picture. "Then they become self-conscious. Their whole mood changes," he said. "Like the boy next to his father, you can't ask that boy. The boy is in his own place. He doesn't want to think of other people."

Grigorian described how he took the award-winning photo.

"I was there an hour before it got dark. I was with two other photographers - one was with the AP," he said. "It took two days. That night we slept nearby in another village, and we returned the next day to continue photographing."

He said he walked up the hill to where people were burying the dead and just started shooting pictures.

"It was one of the first ones that I took, on the first or second roll of film," Grigorian said. "You never know what is going to happen, every event is different."

The best advice Grigorian said he received was to develop a financial foundation first.

"Try to work for a magazine like National Geographic before going freelance to get a good job with a newspaper and save up one year's salary," he said. "I didn't, even though when I graduated I accumulated a lot of debt."

Grigorian said he went on several freelance trips that he funded himself anyway.

"Last month, the U.S. News and World Report magazine ran a double truck of my work in a news feature," Grigorian said. "It paid $1,000 and the agency got half."

Grigorian explained how an agency could also get 30 percent and the photographer gets 70 percent.

"It's hard when you are giving away a percentage of your income to an agency, but they know a lot, and I don't like this part of the business."

His friend, Jay Clendenin, said this award could make Grigorian one of the best in the world.

Keegan and Clendenin said now that Gregorian is more well-known, the award will put his career into high gear and he will get more assignments.

"Now that's cool," Keegan said.

Now his agency wants to send him to Kurdish territory in Iraq, Grigorian said.