Westport native and Staples High School graduate Tyler Hicks has just won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography.
He received the award — one of the most prestigious in journalism — for “his compelling pictures that showed skill and bravery in documenting the unfolding terrorist attack at Westgate mall in Kenya.”
The event took place last September. Hicks — a staff photographer for the New York Times who has covered major conflicts around the world, won numerous other major awards, and survived a kidnapping in Libya — now lives in Nairobi. When he heard news of the massacre, he raced to the scene.
The Pulitzer Prize website shows 19 of Hicks’ photos. They include these:
Tyler Hicks travels the world. He has seen sights, and undergone experiences, that none of us could ever comprehend.
He has recorded them — in all their brutality and gruesomeness — for all the world to see.
It’s a terrible — and terribly important — business. But no one does it better.