The New York Times Presents:
Tyler Hicks: One Year
Featuring Tyler Hicks
Curated by Michele McNally
Over more than a decade in Iraq and Afghanistan, in Somalia and Libya, capturing America’s wars, the Arab Spring and African civil conflict, Tyler Hicks has come to personify combat photography. “My job is to document in the most simple way possible and the most straightforward way possible the news that’s happening in front of me,” Mr. Hicks said. Might it not be better, he has been asked, to forget some of the horrors he had seen? “When you put yourself in somebody else’s space, you involve yourself in someone else’s world,” he replied. “To try to turn off those experiences after the fact would be wrong. You have a responsibility both to yourself and to your subjects to remember them.”
Tyler Hicks is a staff photographer for The New York Times. Mr. Hicks began working for The Times as a contract photographer in Kenya in 1999, photographing news stories in East and West Africa. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Mr. Hicks traveled to Afghanistan for The Times and arrived in Kabul as the Northern Alliance liberated the city from Taliban control. He has returned to Afghanistan yearly and continues to document the conflict there.
Mr. Hicks was born in São Paulo, Brazil, on July 9, 1969. He graduated in 1992 with a B.A. in journalism from Boston University, after which he worked as a photographer’s assistant at a commercial studio and then as a photographer at The Troy Daily News in Ohio, and at the The Wilmington Star-News in North Carolina.
In 2009, Mr. Hicks was a member of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting coverage for of Afghanistan and Pakistan. He received the Newspaper Photographer of the Year award from Pictures of the Year International for his work in 2006. In 2001, Mr. Hicks was the recipient of the 2001 ICP Infinity Award for Photojournalism for his coverage in Afghanistan, as well as other awards, including World Press and Pictures of the Year and Visa Pour L’image in Perpignan, France. He was given the George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting in 2012, with Jeffrey Gettleman, for coverage of Somalia and the Horn of Africa.
