Tim Hetherington: The Lens of War

MARCH 6, 2012 TAGS: WAR, PHOTOGRAPHY ADD A COMMENT

On April 20, 2011 Tim Hetherington was killed while photographing Libyan rebels trying to hold the city of Misrata from Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi's government forces. Hetherington had made a career of photographing from the canon's mouth: encamping with soldiers, revolutionaries and citizens in conflict areas around the world. In 2010, he was nominated for an Academy Award for co-directing the Afghan war documentary, Restrepo.

The following story is excerpted from the forthcoming book, Photographs Not Taken: A Collection of Photographers’ Essays edited by Will Steacy and published by Daylight Magazine. Click here for more.

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There are many reasons not to take a picture—especially if you find the  act of making pictures difficult. I was not brought up with a camera, I  had no early fascination for pictures, no romantic encounters with the  darkroom—in fact I didn’t become a photographer until much later on  in life when I came to realize that photography—especially documentary  photography—had many possibilities. One thing for sure was that  it would make me confront any inherent shyness that I might feel. It  did, but I still find making pictures difficult, especially negotiating and confronting “the other,” the subject, and dealing with my own motivations  and feelings about that process. 

This personal debate about making pictures was particularly apparent  during the years I lived and worked in West Africa. In 2003 I lived as one  of the only outsiders with a rebel group that was attempting to overthrow  then-President Charles Taylor. It was a surreal experience—cut off  and living in the interior of the country, I accompanied a rag-tag army  of heavily armed young men as they fought their way from the interior  forest into the outskirts of the capital, Monrovia. Reaching the edges of the city was an exhilarating experience after weeks of living in a derelict  front-line town with little food. At one point, the rebels took over the  beer factory and, after liberating its supplies, turned part of the facility  into a field hospital where people with gunshot wounds were treated  with paracetamol. Outside the factory compound lay about five bodie s of people who, from the look of things, had been executed. A number  had their hands tied behind their backs and most had been shot in the head and, despite the graphic nature, I had no qualms about making  some photographs of these people.

Not long after, government forces counterattacked to push the rebels out of the city. Everyone was exhausted from the lack of sleep and constant  fighting, and the retreat quickly turned into a disorganized scramble  to get out of the city. Soldiers commandeered looted vehicles, and I even remember one dragging a speedboat behind it in the stampede  to escape. To make matters worse, government soldiers were closing in on the escape route and began firing from different directions on the  convoy of vehicles. One rocket-propelled grenade took out a car behind ours, and at one point we abandoned our vehicles and took shelter in a nearby group of houses. I began seriously considering abandoning the rebels and heading out on my own toward the coastline on foot, but luckily thought better of it and got back inside the car with the group I was with.   

The road slowly wound its way away from the low-slung shacks of the suburbs and back into the lush green forest. Our close-knit convoy  started to thin a little as some cars sped out ahead while others, laden  with people and booty, took their time. The landscape slid by as I tried  to come down and calm my mind from the earlier events—I was in a  heightened state of tension, tired, hungry, and aware that I was totally  out of control of events. Just as I started to feel the euphoria of being  alive, our car slowed in the commotion of a traffic jam. A soft-topped  truck up ahead that was carrying about 30 civilians had skidded as it  went around a corner and turned over on itself. A number of people  had been killed and wounded—probably having the same thoughts of  relief that I had before calamity struck. Now they were dead and their  squashed bodies were being carried out from the wreckage. Someone  asked me if I was going to photograph this—but I was too far gone to be able to attempt any recording of the event. I couldn’t think straight, let  alone muster the energy needed to make a picture. I just watched from  a distance as people mourned and carried away the dead. My brain was like a plate of scrambled eggs.  

There isn’t much more to add, but I always remember that day and the  feeling of being so empty—physically, mentally, and spiritually—that it  was impossible to make the photograph.  

Years later, when I put together a book about those events in Liberia, I  included a photograph of one of the people who had been killed outside  of the beer factory. I thought it was an important picture but didn’t  dwell on what it might mean for the mother of that boy to come across  it printed in a book. My thoughts about this resurfaced recently as I put  together a new book about a group of American soldiers I spent a lot of time with in Afghanistan. They reminded me a lot of the young Liberian  rebel fighters, and yet, when I came to selecting a picture of one of their  dead in the battlefield, I hesitated and wondered if printing a graphic  image was appropriate. It was an image I had made of a young man shot in the head after the American lines had been overrun—not dissimilar  from the one in Liberia. My hesitation troubled me. Was I sensitive  this time because the soldier wasn’t a nameless African? Perhaps I had  changed and realized that there should be limits on what is released  into the public? I certainly wouldn’t have been in that questioning position if I’d never taken the photograph in the first place....but I did, and  perhaps these things are worth thinking about and confronting after all.  Tim Hetherington

 
Tim Hetherington (1970-2011) was a British-American photographer and filmmaker. His work ranged from digital projections to fly-poster exhibitions  to handheld-device downloads. Hetherington published two monographs, Long Story Bit By Bit (Umbrage Editions, 2009) about Liberia,  and Infidel (Chris Boot, 2010) about Afghanistan. His Oscar-nominated film Restrepo, about the war in Afghanistan, was also released in 2010. Tragically, Hetherington was killed by mortar shells while covering the 2011 Libyan civil war.