Tyler Hicks Tells The Story Behind His Pulitzer-Winning Nairobi Mall Photos
A few days after winning a Pulitzer Prize for his photos of a 2013 terrorist attack in a Nairobi mall, Tyler Hicks received an email. It was from one of the women he'd photographed that day — sheltering her two young children on the floor of a cafe. She had heard about the Pulitzer and seen her photo on The New York Times website.
"It's very rare to have access to people in chaotic scenes like this," Hicks tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "You take someone's picture, it's this amazing scene and then you never find out what happened to them. ... I called her and we had a Skype video talk and it was incredible. She showed me her children, a 2-year-old boy and a 10-year-old girl, and told me the whole story: how they laid there for five hours. ... They could smell the smoke from the gunpowder and she told me how they got through this."
The attack at Westgate Mall was the work of Islamist extremists, killing more than 65 people and injuring many more. Hicks rushed into the mall after the attack began and took pictures as the story unfolded.