Tyler Hicks is one of the best war photographers in history. He has won the Pulitzer Prize and worked with some of the best, including C. J. Chivers and Dexter Filkins, trying to explain a world gone mad.
In March of last year, Hicks— along with colleagues Anthony Shadid, Lynsey Addario and Stephen Farrell— was captured by Libyan forces, while covering the revolution in Libya for the New York Times. The article that the four of them wrote together explaining their ordeal, “4 Times Journalists Held Captive in Libya Faced Days of Brutality“, was a crushingly personal tale that also shed light on the story they were there to cover.
Last month Anthony Shadid died of an asthma attack while covering a story in Syria. This morning the New York Times published an article written by Hicks called, “Bearing Witness in Syria: A Correspondent’s Last Days“. I dare you to read it without crying. Hicks is a photographer, not a writer. It’s a hybrid document where he recounts the last days of his friend and colleague— ending with Shadid collapsing while Hicks was holding him up— and tries to tell the story they went there to get. Here’s a snip:
That evening I read a book while Anthony walked down the street to interview some fighters we had been with that day. A while later an activist returned to tell me that Anthony wanted me to follow him and to bring my cameras. I arrived back at the base where we had seen them prepare their weapons, and as is the custom I took off my shoes before entering. There I found a carpeted room full of the fighters, now familiar to us, singing and playing traditional music, some clapping as one sang.
Directly across from me, amid cigarette smoke and sitting among them, was Anthony with a huge smile on his face. This was exactly the kind of connection that made him most happy as a reporter; his great warmth and intelligence were part of what made him the most important journalist covering the Arab world.
He put his arms out and said gleefully, “Tyler, look at this!” I found a seat next to him. Always wanting to share the experience, he told me that when they started singing he immediately sent for me. They served a dessert of sweet cheese, doused in a sticky syrup. They ad-libbed to incorporate us into the lyrics of one of their songs, thanking us for coming to Syria to witness their struggle.
Read this article. Buy the newspaper in which it appears, and clip it out. Press it in a book or fold it into a novel on your bookshelf. And then, as time goes by, if you get nagged by doubts about the future of journalism, or want to debate about pay walls or Craigslist, pull this story out and read it again. And you will be reminded that the New York Times Company paid two friends to go find out what was happening with defectors from the Syrian Army in early 2012, and one of them died of a horse allergy, and the other one carried his body over the border between Syria and Turkey.
