Mr. Ultang and a fellow photographer turned in a series of photos that depicted an obviously unsportsmanlike blow. CreditJohn Robinson and Don Ultang/The Des Moines Register

Don Ultang, an early specialist in aerial photography who won the 1952Pulitzer Prize for photography for documenting an egregious, seemingly racially motivated assault on the field during a college football game, died on Sept. 18 in Johnston, Iowa, where he lived. He was 91.

His daughter Joanne Ultang confirmed his death.

On Oct. 20, 1951, Mr. Ultang and another photographer, John Robinson, were dispatched by The Des Moines Register to Stillwater, Okla., to cover a football game between Drake University, which is in Des Moines, and Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State).

Drake’s star, Johnny Bright, was being spoken of as a Heisman Trophy contender. He had twice led the nation in total offense, and two years earlier, when he first played against A&M, he was reported to have been the first black player to appear on Lewis Field in Stillwater.

In the first quarter, an A&M lineman, Milbanks Smith, delivered several vicious hits to Bright, one of which was a forearm to the face as Bright stood in repose after handing the ball off to another runner; it broke his jaw. Mr. Ultang and Mr. Robinson turned in a series of six photos that depicted an obviously unsportsmanlike blow.

Published the next day and taking up an entire page of The Register, the photos had an immediate impact. Drake withdrew from the Missouri Valley Conference, and the incident hastened the requirement that college football players wear mouthpieces and helmets with face masks. Mr. Ultang, who had shot with a still camera, and Mr. Robinson, who had a sequence camera, shared the Pulitzer Prize. (In a 1999 interview for an oral history project conducted by the University of Iowa journalism school, Mr. Ultang said his photograph of the play was identical to the final shot of Mr. Robinson’s sequence. Mr. Robinson died in 1972.)

It was not uncommon for teams to go hard after the opposition’s star player, and Smith always denied that the assault was racially motivated. In any event, the injury effectively ended Bright’s college career, though he went on to play in the Canadian Football League and was inducted into its Hall of Fame. He died in 1983.

Donald Theodore Ultang was born on March 23, 1917, in Fort Dodge, Iowa, and grew up in Cedar Rapids. After graduating from the University of Iowa in 1939 with a degree in economics and an interest in photography, he was hired by The Register and shortly thereafter decided to learn to fly, signing up for a government-financed civilian pilot program. He joined the Navy during World War II and served as a stateside flight instructor.

As he told the story, on his return, he persuaded The Register to buy a plane for editorial use, like aerial photography. As the only pilot on the staff, he took pictures while flying the plane. He let go of the controls briefly to shoot a flood, a train wreck or simply a segment of the vast Midwestern panorama with a heavy Speed Graphix camera, before circling around for another take, often just a few hundred feet above the ground.

“Low and slow is what kills pilots,” Mr. Ultang explained in the oral history project. “I had to be low to get the job done, and I simply kept about 20 miles per hour extra air speed.”

Many of Mr. Ultang’s pictures were collected in “Holding the Moment: Mid-America at Mid-Century” (Iowa State Press, 1991).

“What I had to learn to do as I flew toward a subject was to time the moment when I started to bank,” he said, “so when I got into the full 45- or 50-degree bank, the subject was out in front of me. It gave me an unobstructed view of about five seconds.”

In addition to Joanne Ultang, who lives in Chicago, Mr. Ultang, who was widowed twice, is survived by two other daughters, Linda Powers and Ellen Caroline Ull; four grandchildren; and five great grandchildren.

Mr. Ultang had flown to the game in Stillwater on that day in 1951, but in order to return to Des Moines and develop the pictures in time for the daily deadline, he and Mr. Robinson stayed only through the first quarter. By then, Johnny Bright was on the sidelines with a broken jaw.

“If all this had happened in the second quarter, we wouldn’t have even been there,” Mr. Ultang said.

Donald T Ultang