In this photo, part of the award-winning package, Jack Ormond, 10, watches movers load his family’s belongings in Cranston.

The Providence Journal / John Freidah

A series of photographs showing Rhode Islanders forced from their homes by mortgage foreclosures has won Journal photographer John Freidah a prestigious award.

Freidah, whose pictures were among the 45,000 images entered into the 65th annual Pictures of the Year International contest, took first place in the Issue Reporting category.

The pictures accompanied “Borrowing Trouble,” a special report with business staff writer Lynn Arditi that exposed a bitter irony of the subprime lending crisis: the banks’ widespread practice of evicting renters whose landlords have fallen behind on their loans.

A staff photographer since 1995, Freidah is a three-time winner of the National Press Photographers Association’s Photographer of the Year award. In 1997, he worked with projo.com to produce “A Time to Die,” one of the Web site’s first multimedia efforts.

He traveled twice to Iraq to cover the Rhode Island troops dispatched there. His work on the 2005 series, “Saving Block Island,” won numerous awards.

Freidah is a graduate of Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., where he earned a degree in engineering physics. Before becoming a staff photographer, he was a fiber-optic engineer.

Pictures of the Year International is a program of the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute of the Missouri School of Journalism. This isn’t the first time that the program has given Freidah an award.

His photography on “Poisoned,” a series with staff writer Peter Lord about lead poisoning in Rhode Island, took first place in the Issue Reporting category in 2001.