The New York Times has swept the 2014 Pulitzer Prizes for photography. The staff photographer Tyler Hicks won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in breaking news photography for his coverage of a terrorist attack at an upscale mall in Nairobi, Kenya, that left more than 60 people dead. Josh Haner was awarded the Pulitzer in feature photography for his images of the slow and painful recovery process for a survivor of the Boston Marathon bombing.

The announcement was made on Monday by Columbia University, which bestows the awards.

“For me it’s a symbol of what we do at the newspaper as a whole — the best of foreign reporting and the best of our enterprise,” said Michele McNally, the paper’s assistant managing editor for photography. “It is recognition that our photojournalism is on par with the quality of The New York Times’s reporting, which is the best in the world.”

This is the second time that the Times has won both Pulitzer photography prizes in the same year. In 2002 The Times won in breaking news for a portfolio of work by 15 photographers who covered the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and the feature award for five photographers’ work in Pakistan and Afghanistan after those attacks.

Mr. Hicks was part of a Times team that won the 2009 Pulitzer for international reporting from Afghanistan and Pakistan. He has won numerous international awards, including Newspaper Photographer of the Year from Pictures of the Year International in 2006.

“Though Tyler has never won an individual Pulitzer before, in my mind he’s won it every year,” Ms. McNally said. “This is the culmination of all the work he’s ever done for this paper. It is well deserved.”

Mr. Hicks said, “It’s a huge honor to be recognized in this way, and it’s a reminder to me that these stories, however far away and however remote, are being noticed and that the risks that photographers all over the world take in going to dangerous places are being acknowledged and rewarded.”

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Mr. Hicks was born in Brazil and raised in Westport, Conn. He worked at The Troy Daily News in Ohio, where he was hired by Chris Hondros, who died in April 2011 while photographing in Libya. Mr. Hicks, 44, also worked at The Wilmington Morning Star in North Carolina.

He lives in Nairobi and was just blocks from the mall when the attack started. As it unfolded, he went inside with security forces as they searched for the attackers. In an interview with Lens later that day Mr. Hicks — who has covered the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and was among four Times journalists abducted and brutalized in Libya in 2011 — described the scene.

“I could see that there were multiple bodies lying dead in the mall, some lying together just next to where they were having lunch at a cafe,” he said. “It seemed everywhere you turned there was another body.”

He said that an attack like the one in Nairobi was at least as dangerous, if not more so, than covering the Afghan war and that inside the mall he had to think about where he was standing, what to cover and the type of obstacles to place between him and the gunmen.

“This is just plain and simple murder of unarmed civilians,” said Mr. Hicks, who has covered many violent conflicts in his career, including Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Sudan. “It’s not a war. These militants went into the mall and executed people: women and children, anyone who got in their path. That’s not typical of war.”

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Mr. Hicks passes the mall, now bullet ridden and boarded up, almost every day. Each time, he says, it brings back memories of the attack. Events like this attract global attention for a short while and then are often forgotten by most people, he said.

He chooses to remember as much as he can.

“I don’t believe that it’s better to forget, after you volunteer to go and cover conflict or enter the Westgate Mall during a terrorist attack — you’re committing to that experience,” he said. “I think it would be disrespectful to the people you’ve photographed suffering in terrible circumstances to tuck those memories away and ignore them. You owe it to each person to not forget what happened. Once you have witnessed these events then they are part of you, they are a part of who you are.”

Mr. Haner, 34, won the feature Pulitzer for his photographs of Jeff Bauman, who lost both legs in the Boston Marathon bombing. Mr. Haner followed Mr. Bauman, 28, over the course of two and a half months, documenting his struggles and private moments with his family and girlfriend.

Mr. Bauman was at the marathon to cheer on his girlfriend, Erin Hurley, when the bombs went off. A graphic photo of him being pushed in a wheelchair chair moments after the explosions, taken by Charles Krupa of The Associated Press, became one of the most widely published images from that day.

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Mr. Haner arrived in Boston that evening to cover the aftermath, and over the next few days he worked with, among others, the reporter Tim Rohan, who had recently finished an internship at The Times.

Mr. Rohan, 24, connected with the Bauman family and wrote “Beyond the Finish Line,” which detailed Mr. Bauman’s recovery. Together the journalists spent a lot of time with Mr. Bauman, at times playing video games with him when he was without other visitors.

In an interview with the Nieman Storyboard site last year, Mr. Rohan described what happened when Mr. Haner started photographing the story.

“After the first week and a half our photographer, Josh Haner, joined in, and he fit like a glove,” Mr. Rohan said. “Everyone loves Josh, so when he came in he made the atmosphere lighthearted. It was a good mix of people. That really was important, to keep Jeff at ease.”

Witnessing Mr. Baumann’s painful recovery was difficult for Mr. Haner.

“The most important thing I learned was when to not take a picture — knowing that there were certain moments to be respected and just let the moment stand on its own without the interruption of a click,” he said. “It’s knowing when a picture is exploitative and when it’s necessary for the story.”

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Mr. Haner also shot video daily, often carrying four DSLR’s — two equipped specifically for video and the other two for stills. A video produced by Mr. Haner, Catherine Spangler and Mr. Rohan won a first-place award in the Best of Photojournalism contest and a second place in Picture of the Year International for feature multimedia story.

Like Mr. Hicks, Mr. Haner also spoke about the length of the public’s memories.

“My concern is that people forget tragedies like this,” he said. “It’s important to bring attention to what survivors are going through and how their lives change, and help them.”

Ms. McNally brought Mr. Haner to The Times in 2004 after he had worked for her at Fortune magazine for a year. He was a co-founder of the Lens blog in 2009. He is currently a staff photographer and the senior editor for photo technology.

Among his many contributions to the use and display of photos at The Times is developing a backpack-size transmission device that allows images from major events to be sent instantaneously and posted online within minutes. He has carefully guarded his technological advances from competitors.

Mr. Haner started photographing when he was 10 and immersed himself in photography at the free Harvey Milk Community Darkroom in San Francisco while in elementary school. In 1995, at the age of 15, he started interning with Against All Odds Productions, run by the creator of the “Day in The Life” series of photo books, where he met Ms. McNally as well as the Times deputy photo editor Meaghan Looram.

At Stanford University he studied symbolic systems, which combines computer science, philosophy, psychology and linguistics, and was also the photo editor for the school newspaper. After graduation, he moved into a trailer park for five months for a documentary photo project, then went to work with Ms. McNally at Fortune.

“I hired Josh when he was 23, and at The Times I reconfigured his job from photo editor to technology editor to staff photographer,” she said. “He is brilliant and can do anything.”

Like playing third base in a mostly Dominican baseball league. He played a doubleheader on Saturday in the Bronx with his team, the Downtown Bulls.

Mr. Haner submitted the project for the feature photography Pulitzer. He said that he understood that deciding what to submit was a difficult decision for The Times, particularly with so much good work done at the paper this year. At first he was not thinking of entering himself, but friends pushed him to do so.

“I felt so passionately about this story and I felt that it was the best work I’d ever done and I did not want to have regrets haunting me in the future,” he said.

Today, standing before his colleagues in the newsroom, he reached a spot he had dreamed of as a child in the Bay area.

“It’s what I wanted my whole life since I picked up the camera and was reading all the credits in the San Francisco Chronicle and was trying to figure out who all these photgraphers were and hoping one day to be among them,” he said.

Today, he was.

The complete slide show for both Mr. Haner and Mr. Hicks’s winning entries have been published on The New York Times.

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