Tyler Hicks is a staff photographer for The New York Times. He 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, he 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.
As a freelancer for The Times, he lived with a Kosovar family while covering the escalating conflict in the Balkans. Two years later, with the arrival of peacekeepers and an end to the conflict, he left for Africa to cover the escalating war between Eritrea and Ethiopia. Tyler graduated in 1992 with a B.A. in journalism from Boston University, where he returned in 2011 to deliver the commencement speech for the College of Communication. After graduation, he worked as a photographer’s assistant at a commercial studio in Boston and then at The Troy Daily News, a small newspaper in Ohio, where he spent a year as chief photographer. He later moved to North Carolina, where he was a staff photographer for three years at The Wilmington Star-News. During his time there, he also photographed projects in Haiti, Albania, and Kosovo. Moved by the atrocities he saw in Kosovo, he left his job to pursue a career in international news.
In 2009, Tyler 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, he 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.
Tyler Hicks was born in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1969. He lives in Nairobi, Kenya.
