The sad news of the death of Oscar-nominated filmmaker and photographer Tim Hetherington three years ago on April 20, 2011 — hit by mortar fire in the Libyan city of Misrata while making video documentation of the battle there between Muammar Gaddafi’s forces and Libyan rebels — had particular poignancy for me.
This isn’t to diminish in any way the gravity of the simultaneous death of Pulitzer Prize-nominated photographer Chris Hondros, or the wounding of two other photographers, Guy Martin and Michael Christopher Brown. Or the subsequent death of French photojournalist Remi Ochlik in Syria. Or the most recent death of Anja Niedringhaus in Afghanistan. But Hetherington and I had shared a curious moment almost exactly eleven years earlier, so the report that he’d been fatally injured made his passing more personal.
Andre Liohn, a fellow photographer in Libya, was the first to report the news of Hetherington’s demise on his Facebook page. (Tim’s parents, Alistair and Judith, have set up a website, Remembering Tim, where friends, family, colleagues, and others can share remembrances and thoughts about him and his work. Here’s a 2008 interview with Hetherington, from the BBC World News program “Firing Line,” published in conjunction with the Rory Peck Awards, which recognises the work of freelance journalists who work in hostile environments.)
World Press Photo 2000
Tim Hetherington, Feb. 2011. Photo by Justin Hoch, courtesy Creative Commons.
Tim was born Timothy Alistair Telemachus Hetherington in Birkenhead, England (that’s Liverpool) on December 5, 1970. Seems he took seriously his second middle name; Odysseus’s son Telemachus, you may recall, journeys throughout the Odyssey in search of news about his father, who has been away at war. So Tim was just past 40 when he met his end, and about half-past 29 when he and I met for the first and only time in Amsterdam on April 16-17, 2000.
We’d both come to The Netherlands to participate in the Y2K World Press Photo Awards Days, an annual celebration of documentary, photojournalism, and press photography held in the Dutch capital, where World Press Photo (henceforth WPP) was founded in 1955. The organization’s highest-profile project is its annual WPP exhibition, visited by over two million people in over 100 cities in some 45 countries worldwide, accompanied by a yearbook presenting all prize-winning entries, published in six languages and widely distributed.
WPP’s Awards Days celebration, which includes the premiere of that year’s annual exhibition, brings together professionals in the field of information-based imagery: photographers, of course, but also picture editors, periodical and book publishers, directors of picture agencies, representatives of various photo-industry companies (Kodak, Nikon, etc.), and others. I’d flown over to deliver the keynote address to that year’s gathering of movers, shakers, and practitioners; Tim attended as winner of the second prize in the “Sports Stories” category for his project on “Football as rehabilitation in Liberia,” a significant honor given that even acceptance into the WPP’s annual Joop Swart Masterclass qualifies for inclusion on one’s professional resumé. (He’d subsequently win the even more prestigious “Picture of the Year” WPP award in 2007.)
You’ll find a PDF file of my keynote talk here.
Immediately after my talk, a panel convened to engage the topic “Identify your mission: How will the market for photography develop in the 21st century?” The WPP Awards Days program billed this as a “public discussion moderated by Stephen Mayes (New York), chief operating officer, Photonica USA,” stating its theme thus:
It is necessary for everyone in the press business to re-evaluate their reasons for working with images. In today’s market, traditional newspapers and magazines redefine their editorial policies, and press photographers themselves create new venues and outlets for their work. On-line news services, exhibitions and website galleries are becoming an important outlet for documentary photography. A growing number of photography books are being published and exhibitions in prestigious museums and galleries attract wide interest. While galleries and book publishers distribute press photography, press photographers now work in advertising, and fashion photographers visit war zones. How do these new identities and opportunities influence the way photographers work, and how the media and the photo agencies define their missions?
In addition to myself, the WPP panel participants included Grazia Neri (Milan), then president of Agenzia Grazia Neri, which has since gone out of business; Manfred Heiting (Amsterdam/Berlin/Los Angeles), curator, collector, and project director of the German Center for Photography and Media Arts in Berlin; Ulli Michel (London), former Reuters global pictures editor and newly appointed as the global marketing director for pictures, Reuters New Media; and Tim Hetherington (London), then listed as “photographer for Panos Pictures and creative associate of the internet photography project Further Vision.”
Each panelist (aside from myself) opened with a brief statement describing his or her activity. Tim, to my surprise and delight, prefaced his comments by saying “I’m the photographer A. D. Coleman just described,” showing onscreen a few examples of his multimedia and online activities. In his own brief prizewinner’s talk the following afternoon, he proceeded to demonstrate that in detail. And he continued to do so throughout his remarkable career, right to its abrupt end. You’ll find examples of his multimedia photojournalism at his website.
Restrepo dvd cover
Tim and I chatted several times during those days in Amsterdam; I thanked him for exemplifying my predictions, and he thanked me for validating the direction in which he and his cohort had begun to move with their work. In person he was amiable, humorful, unpretentious, relaxed yet intense (also exceedingly tall).
Feeling a sense of kinship with him due to this Amsterdam connection, I tracked his work over the next decade as he became a contributing photographer for Vanity Fair and co-directed the Afghan War film Restrepo with author Sebastian Junger, applauding when that film won numerous awards, including the Grand Jury Prize for best documentary at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, and was nominated for an Oscar for best documentary in 2011. (Click here for the Restrepo trailer.)
Restrepo
I found Restrepo tough to watch, though not for the reasons I expected. The film follows 15 men, the 2nd Platoon of Battle Company of the the 173rd Airborne Brigade, through their 15-month deployment to the Korengal Valley in northeast Afghanistan. Hetherington and Junger embedded themselves with this troop; the story is told through their eyes, mostly in their own words. The directors state their purpose thus:
The war in Afghanistan has become highly politicized, but soldiers rarely take part in that discussion. Our intention was to capture the experience of combat, boredom and fear through the eyes of the soldiers themselves. Their lives were our lives: we did not sit down with their families, we did not interview Afghans, we did not explore geopolitical debates. Soldiers are living and fighting and dying at remote outposts in Afghanistan in conditions that few Americans back home can imagine. Their experiences are important to understand, regardless of one’s political beliefs. Beliefs are a way to avoid looking at reality. This is reality.
Still from “Restrepo,” 2010, film by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington.
CNN dubbed the Korengal Valley, where they lived under steady and almost continuous Taliban attack during their entire tour of duty, “the deadliest place on earth.” Yet while its 90 minutes are peppered with gunfire, the film does not actually depict combat scenes at any length. No enemy, living or dead, appears on-screen. In one short scene we briefly see the body of a dead U.S. soldier and his comrades’ reaction to his death. Otherwise we observe these soldiers shooting into a seemingly unpopulated landscape, and hear return fire from an invisible source — a bit like the “Shock and Awe” barrage that opened the war in Iraq in March 2003, writ small.
I don’t say this to fault the film; I think that’s part of its point. We watch these young men, airlifted by their superiors into the midst of a guerilla war zone populated by Muslim goatherds and subsistence farmers, hold the fort and survive (or not) for months, only to be airlifted out again at the end of 15 months from a position that the the U.S. military would abandon entirely shortly thereafter. They’re interlopers, fighting an enemy they can’t find, or even see, embedded within the local population. They don’t speak the language; they don’t understand the culture. They can’t tell friend from foe. The U.S. Army has placed them in what is on every level, from the literal to the metaphorical, an untenable position. That they manage to hold their ground testifies to their courage, skill, and tenacity. That the Army — and, atop the Army, the U.S. Government, which means us, that government’s citizens — asked them to do so testifies to something else.
‘Restrepo’ film directors Sebastian Junger (left) and Tim Hetherington (right) at the Restrepo outpost in the Korengal Valley, Afghanistan.
Hetherington and Junger show these warriors meeting with the local chieftains, addressing and negotiating everything from human casualties among the local population to the accidental death of a valuable cow. We see them going out on patrol, and taking care of business in camp — building fortifications, burning their own excrement, socializing. Intercut with these scenes the directors give us direct statements by some of the soldiers, filmed in Italy after their tour ends and before they return to their homes. They strike me as thoughtful, decent people who have been to what Bernard B. Fall, in a book about the Vietnam War, described as “hell in a very small place,” who did the best they could there as soldiers and who, as people of conscience, will never be the same again.
What I find hard to bear about the film is the utter pointlessness of what these young men were asked to do (and did), the squandering of their time and in some cases their very lives, the traumatic situation into which the military thrust them and whose psychic consequences they will bear for the rest of their days. They need make no apologies for their behavior, individually or collectively. But what has been done to them, and what they were asked to do, I consider unforgivable.
(Part 1 I 2.)
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This post supported by a donation from the Estate of Lyle Bongé.
SPJ Research Award 2014
Tim Hetherington, 1970-2011: A Farewell (1)
The sad news of the death of Oscar-nominated filmmaker and photographer Tim Hetherington three years ago on April 20, 2011 — hit by mortar fire in the Libyan city of Misrata while making video documentation of the battle there between Muammar Gaddafi’s forces and Libyan rebels — had particular poignancy for me.
This isn’t to diminish in any way the gravity of the simultaneous death of Pulitzer Prize-nominated photographer Chris Hondros, or the wounding of two other photographers, Guy Martin and Michael Christopher Brown. Or the subsequent death of French photojournalist Remi Ochlik in Syria. Or the most recent death of Anja Niedringhaus in Afghanistan. But Hetherington and I had shared a curious moment almost exactly eleven years earlier, so the report that he’d been fatally injured made his passing more personal.
Andre Liohn, a fellow photographer in Libya, was the first to report the news of Hetherington’s demise on his Facebook page. (Tim’s parents, Alistair and Judith, have set up a website, Remembering Tim, where friends, family, colleagues, and others can share remembrances and thoughts about him and his work. Here’s a 2008 interview with Hetherington, from the BBC World News program “Firing Line,” published in conjunction with the Rory Peck Awards, which recognises the work of freelance journalists who work in hostile environments.)
World Press Photo 2000
Tim Hetherington, Feb. 2011. Photo by Justin Hoch, courtesy Creative Commons.
Tim was born Timothy Alistair Telemachus Hetherington in Birkenhead, England (that’s Liverpool) on December 5, 1970. Seems he took seriously his second middle name; Odysseus’s son Telemachus, you may recall, journeys throughout the Odyssey in search of news about his father, who has been away at war. So Tim was just past 40 when he met his end, and about half-past 29 when he and I met for the first and only time in Amsterdam on April 16-17, 2000.
We’d both come to The Netherlands to participate in the Y2K World Press Photo Awards Days, an annual celebration of documentary, photojournalism, and press photography held in the Dutch capital, where World Press Photo (henceforth WPP) was founded in 1955. The organization’s highest-profile project is its annual WPP exhibition, visited by over two million people in over 100 cities in some 45 countries worldwide, accompanied by a yearbook presenting all prize-winning entries, published in six languages and widely distributed.
WPP’s Awards Days celebration, which includes the premiere of that year’s annual exhibition, brings together professionals in the field of information-based imagery: photographers, of course, but also picture editors, periodical and book publishers, directors of picture agencies, representatives of various photo-industry companies (Kodak, Nikon, etc.), and others. I’d flown over to deliver the keynote address to that year’s gathering of movers, shakers, and practitioners; Tim attended as winner of the second prize in the “Sports Stories” category for his project on “Football as rehabilitation in Liberia,” a significant honor given that even acceptance into the WPP’s annual Joop Swart Masterclass qualifies for inclusion on one’s professional resumé. (He’d subsequently win the even more prestigious “Picture of the Year” WPP award in 2007.)
You’ll find a PDF file of my keynote talk here.
It is necessary for everyone in the press business to re-evaluate their reasons for working with images. In today’s market, traditional newspapers and magazines redefine their editorial policies, and press photographers themselves create new venues and outlets for their work. On-line news services, exhibitions and website galleries are becoming an important outlet for documentary photography. A growing number of photography books are being published and exhibitions in prestigious museums and galleries attract wide interest. While galleries and book publishers distribute press photography, press photographers now work in advertising, and fashion photographers visit war zones. How do these new identities and opportunities influence the way photographers work, and how the media and the photo agencies define their missions?
In addition to myself, the WPP panel participants included Grazia Neri (Milan), then president of Agenzia Grazia Neri, which has since gone out of business; Manfred Heiting (Amsterdam/Berlin/Los Angeles), curator, collector, and project director of the German Center for Photography and Media Arts in Berlin; Ulli Michel (London), former Reuters global pictures editor and newly appointed as the global marketing director for pictures, Reuters New Media; and Tim Hetherington (London), then listed as “photographer for Panos Pictures and creative associate of the internet photography project Further Vision.”
Each panelist (aside from myself) opened with a brief statement describing his or her activity. Tim, to my surprise and delight, prefaced his comments by saying “I’m the photographer A. D. Coleman just described,” showing onscreen a few examples of his multimedia and online activities. In his own brief prizewinner’s talk the following afternoon, he proceeded to demonstrate that in detail. And he continued to do so throughout his remarkable career, right to its abrupt end. You’ll find examples of his multimedia photojournalism at his website.
Restrepo dvd cover
Tim and I chatted several times during those days in Amsterdam; I thanked him for exemplifying my predictions, and he thanked me for validating the direction in which he and his cohort had begun to move with their work. In person he was amiable, humorful, unpretentious, relaxed yet intense (also exceedingly tall).
Feeling a sense of kinship with him due to this Amsterdam connection, I tracked his work over the next decade as he became a contributing photographer for Vanity Fair and co-directed the Afghan War film Restrepo with author Sebastian Junger, applauding when that film won numerous awards, including the Grand Jury Prize for best documentary at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, and was nominated for an Oscar for best documentary in 2011. (Click here for the Restrepo trailer.)
Restrepo
I found Restrepo tough to watch, though not for the reasons I expected. The film follows 15 men, the 2nd Platoon of Battle Company of the the 173rd Airborne Brigade, through their 15-month deployment to the Korengal Valley in northeast Afghanistan. Hetherington and Junger embedded themselves with this troop; the story is told through their eyes, mostly in their own words. The directors state their purpose thus:
The war in Afghanistan has become highly politicized, but soldiers rarely take part in that discussion. Our intention was to capture the experience of combat, boredom and fear through the eyes of the soldiers themselves. Their lives were our lives: we did not sit down with their families, we did not interview Afghans, we did not explore geopolitical debates. Soldiers are living and fighting and dying at remote outposts in Afghanistan in conditions that few Americans back home can imagine. Their experiences are important to understand, regardless of one’s political beliefs. Beliefs are a way to avoid looking at reality. This is reality.
Still from “Restrepo,” 2010, film by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington.
CNN dubbed the Korengal Valley, where they lived under steady and almost continuous Taliban attack during their entire tour of duty, “the deadliest place on earth.” Yet while its 90 minutes are peppered with gunfire, the film does not actually depict combat scenes at any length. No enemy, living or dead, appears on-screen. In one short scene we briefly see the body of a dead U.S. soldier and his comrades’ reaction to his death. Otherwise we observe these soldiers shooting into a seemingly unpopulated landscape, and hear return fire from an invisible source — a bit like the “Shock and Awe” barrage that opened the war in Iraq in March 2003, writ small.
I don’t say this to fault the film; I think that’s part of its point. We watch these young men, airlifted by their superiors into the midst of a guerilla war zone populated by Muslim goatherds and subsistence farmers, hold the fort and survive (or not) for months, only to be airlifted out again at the end of 15 months from a position that the the U.S. military would abandon entirely shortly thereafter. They’re interlopers, fighting an enemy they can’t find, or even see, embedded within the local population. They don’t speak the language; they don’t understand the culture. They can’t tell friend from foe. The U.S. Army has placed them in what is on every level, from the literal to the metaphorical, an untenable position. That they manage to hold their ground testifies to their courage, skill, and tenacity. That the Army — and, atop the Army, the U.S. Government, which means us, that government’s citizens — asked them to do so testifies to something else.
‘Restrepo’ film directors Sebastian Junger (left) and Tim Hetherington (right) at the Restrepo outpost in the Korengal Valley, Afghanistan.
Hetherington and Junger show these warriors meeting with the local chieftains, addressing and negotiating everything from human casualties among the local population to the accidental death of a valuable cow. We see them going out on patrol, and taking care of business in camp — building fortifications, burning their own excrement, socializing. Intercut with these scenes the directors give us direct statements by some of the soldiers, filmed in Italy after their tour ends and before they return to their homes. They strike me as thoughtful, decent people who have been to what Bernard B. Fall, in a book about the Vietnam War, described as “hell in a very small place,” who did the best they could there as soldiers and who, as people of conscience, will never be the same again.
What I find hard to bear about the film is the utter pointlessness of what these young men were asked to do (and did), the squandering of their time and in some cases their very lives, the traumatic situation into which the military thrust them and whose psychic consequences they will bear for the rest of their days. They need make no apologies for their behavior, individually or collectively. But what has been done to them, and what they were asked to do, I consider unforgivable.
(Part 1 I 2.)
•
This post supported by a donation from the Estate of Lyle Bongé.