Tyler Hicks, 37, a staff photographer for The New York Times, was named the newspaper photographer o

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Mr. Hicks was honored for five series of photographs that he took in 2006 in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Israel, Camden, N.J., and other places.

After working in Afghanistan last year, Mr. Hicks was on a flight, returning to the United States, when Hezbollah fighters kidnapped two Israeli soldiers. He decided to return immediately to the Middle East. Taking photos in Lebanon last summer was particularly difficult, he said.

“The Israeli military was bombing all over Lebanon, and they had warned vehicles, with leaflets that they had dropped, to stay off the road, that any vehicle was subject to being bombed,” Mr. Hicks said. “So that made it very difficult to move around.”

He said that he ended up traveling more on foot because it was safer than being in a vehicle.

Mr. Hicks has worked as a staff photographer for The Times for five years, and previously took freelance photographs for The Times in Nairobi, Kenya, Kosovo and the Balkans. In the last few years, he has photographed the devastation in Indonesia after the tsunami, presidential elections in Haiti and Venezuela, poverty in India and the conflict in Iraq.

He graduated from Boston University with a degree in journalism in 1992.