Tyler Hicks Tells The Story Behind His Pulitzer-Winning Nairobi Mall Photos

“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.”