The boy in the back seat can’t be much older than 15. Bucket hat, faded T-shirt, AK-47 across his lap. The smile on his face fades and the camera cuts to the view through the car’s windshield. It’s raining. A road, densely lined with trees, stretches ahead. A pine-shaped air freshener sways beside the red and white stripes of a flag suspended from the rear-view mirror. If we could see the top of the flag, we would find one white star against the dark blue background, not 50. We’re in Liberia, not America. Familiar news bulletin tones play over the radio: “You’re listening to the BBC World Service for Africa.” A hand wipes away the condensation inside the car window, and suddenly we’re looking at a London street. The street sign reads Marylebone Road NW1. The rain continues.
The scene is from Tim Hetherington’s 2010 short film Diary, an emotive glimpse into the life of a documentarian who worked mostly in conflict zones. Diary was an attempt to make sense of his place in the world — personally, professionally — while pushing the boundaries of factual narrative storytelling. Scenes bleed into one another like memories. The soundscape is composed of rotor blades, machine gun fire, birdsong and voicemail messages. It’s disorienting and hypnotic, gentle yet nightmarish. It is also a reminder of a career that could have been.
On April 20 2011, Hetherington was killed in a mortar attack in Misurata, Libya, while covering the country’s civil war. He was 40. At the time of his death, Hetherington was one of the most decorated documentary photographers in the world. His film Restrepo, the 2010 documentary he co-directed with writer Sebastian Junger, had made him famous. That film followed a US battalion over the course of a year in a remote Afghan outpost, offering an unvarnished view of life on the frontline of America’s “war on terror”. It won the Grand Jury Prize for best documentary at Sundance and an Academy Award nomination. Since then, estimation of Hetherington’s work has only grown and his preoccupation with the role of the storyteller within the story seems increasingly prescient.
For four years preceding his death, I worked with Tim at Panos Pictures, the London-based agency that represents documentary photographers.
For most of that time, I was his assignments editor, responsible for handling commissions and liaising with clients, such as newspapers and NGOs — nominally at least because in all that time, I don’t think I successfully assigned him once. I was always calling, asking if he was free to take on a job for me — everyone wanted to work with him — but he simply never was. He was always busy with some semi-secret project, maybe for Vanity Fair, maybe for Human Rights Watch. He was always working, always pushing.
The results of that dedication will be on show in a major exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London, opening on April 20, the 13th anniversary of his death. It includes Hetherington’s photography and films as well as an array of personal objects: handwritten journals, correspondence, cameras, contact sheets. His entire archive was donated to the museum by the Tim Hetherington Trust in 2017, and the curators have concluded that to evaluate the work we must try to understand its maker.
Taking in a preview of the show, it becomes clear that something besides the technical and creative level at which Tim was working is on display. I also came away questioning the role of the conflict photographer. What should or shouldn’t they do and show? Who do they serve? And what do the rest of us learn by being shown these often horrible things? These were questions that Tim thought about every day. And they are questions that we have had to continue grappling with — during the betrayal of Afghanistan, the invasion of Ukraine, the destruction of Gaza — without him.
Tim Hetherington was born in Liverpool in 1970 to what he once described as a “normal, working-class family”. After graduating from university, he went on a two-year trip around India, China and Tibet, funded by a small inheritance from his grandmother. The trip, he later said, led him to realise he “wanted to make images”.
The desire to make images of war has existed since the birth of photography. Roger Fenton, widely regarded as the world’s first professional war photographer, worked for the British government in the 1850s. He was sent to Balaklava to document the Crimean war, but the photographic equipment then available limited him. The long exposure times needed to make an image meant there could be no action, no movement at all, so Fenton trained his lens on landscapes, the aftermath of battles. He was essentially a propagandist; his job was to depict the war as noble, dignified, devoid of real horror. But the emptiness in his work is haunting, the real terror reserved for the viewer’s imagination.
By the beginning of the first world war, cameras had become compact enough to carry into battle. Between the 1920s and 1950s, the so-called golden age of photojournalism, photographers became more mobile, more able to capture movement. Better flash bulbs allowed them to dump cumbersome tripods, and improvements in printing meant new outlets. With Life Magazine and Picture Post, the photo essay was born.
Photographers working during this period shaped the aesthetics of war photography for decades to come. Robert Capa’s images from the Spanish civil war and the D-Day landings are some of the best-known photographs ever taken. Images from this period also laid the moral foundations of photojournalism: the importance of bearing witness, of capturing the truth, of being objective.
By the time Tim was born, the profession was rethinking its purpose. Over the course of the Vietnam war, freelancers unattached to a news publication or agencies were able to obtain press cards, and a huge influx of war imagery emerged from the conflict. A few came to define Vietnam: Malcolm Browne’s photograph of the self-immolation of Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc. Eddie Adams’ photograph of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong suspect. Ron Haeberle’s photographs of the My Lai massacre. Huynh Cong “Nick” Ut’s photograph of 19-year-old Kim Phuc Phan Thi running naked down a road following a napalm attack on her village. Ultimately, photography was credited for turning Americans against a war for the first time in the country’s history.
By then, the ethics and purpose of war photography had started to change too. The photojournalism Tim studied after going back to school, first at night classes, then at Cardiff University, was more contemplative, more probing of power than the golden age output. Many of the most influential photographers of the period spent prolonged periods in the field. They weren’t interested in simply recording the drama of violence.
After graduating, Tim got a job as a staff photographer at the Big Issue, the magazine produced to be sold in the street by London’s homeless. From the start, he was more than a photographer. Lena Corner, a colleague at the Big Issue at the time, remembered how he was always going on about “imagery, technology and how he had managed to rig up some sort of screen or other contraption in his flat, in his eternal search for new ways to present his pictures. He was really ahead of his time”.
Stephen Mayes, his longtime friend and executive director of the Tim Hetherington Trust, recalls the first time he encountered Tim’s work. He was reviewing student photographers’ final portfolios as an external examiner for Cardiff. “When I came to H for Hetherington, I was inconvenienced by the requirement that I leave my seat to go to another room, where I found a Mac Classic with a CD-Rom reader. My mind was blown by the two stop-motion [and] audio pieces that I saw [depicting a basketball game and scenes from an emergency room]. At a time when there was no viable means of distributing such work, Tim stuck with it. I see his trajectory from Cardiff 1997 to the Hollywood red carpet in 2011 as a continuous process.”
In 1999, Tim travelled to west Africa for the first time. The result was Healing Sport, exploring the restorative power of competition in post-conflict Liberia, Sierra Leone and Angola. “Africa always seems to be stereotyped,” Hetherington told another filmmaker in 2003. “It’s either really, really bad news, or it’s really, really good news.” Tim wanted to find and document nuance. Doing that required what he sometimes called Trojan horses. “The idea is, can we talk about things that people are reluctant to talk about by disguising them in other vehicles?” Healing Sport is about how people remain affected by wars long after they end, but it was presented as uplifting, more easily digested work about sport. If you look closer into the faces of those amputee footballers, you see much more.
That complexity is evident in his work from Liberia, where Tim spent most of his time between 2003 and 2007. He followed the Lurd rebel group as they advanced on the capital, Monrovia, then remained in the country after the end of the civil war. His book Long Story Bit by Bit: Liberia Retold, published in 2009, is a staggering piece of documentary storytelling. It isn’t simply a record of the end of Liberia’s second civil war, but rather an investigation into the characters, power dynamics and international complicity that created the conditions for war and the subsequent search for justice. Colonial and 20th-century history, as well as traditional folkloric tales, are interwoven between the images. As the title suggests, it is a long, complicated story, spanning continents, with origins going back centuries.
Tim and his colleague James Brabazon were the only photographers to live and work behind rebel lines in Liberia, a distinction that earned them execution orders from then president and warlord Charles Taylor. “It was never enough to simply witness events,” Mayes recalls. “He had to experience the lives of his subjects. This is how he [gained] extraordinary access to the rebel forces and unprecedented understanding of their culture and motives.”
This closeness to his subjects, the desire to understand them and live with them, marked Tim out among his contemporaries who, pressured by the news agenda and by finances, often spent relatively short amounts of time in one place.
But there was more that distinguished him. In his obituary for Tim, Brabazon recounted an anecdote about their time working together: “When a rebel commander threatened to execute a doctor tending to injured rebel soldiers, suspecting him of espionage, Tim put himself in front of the condemned man and pleaded for his life, grabbing the pistol from the incensed commander.” This was a break from a previous conception of the photographer’s role being to observe and document, not to intervene. Tim’s dedication was superseded by his humanity. As Brabazon put it, “On that occasion, humanity prevailed and the doctor’s life was saved.”
Tim made the work he’s best known for in Afghanistan. Journalist Sebastian Junger had already made one trip to the Korangal Valley to work on a piece for Vanity Fair, following a platoon over the course of a year. The photographer assigned for the trip didn’t work out and when the magazine presented Junger with a list of potential replacements, Tim’s name jumped out. Junger was aware of his work in Liberia. They had covered the civil war from opposing sides, Junger with the government forces, Tim with the rebels.
In 2007, Tim headed to the Korengal Valley, known internationally as “the valley of death” due to the intensity of fighting there. He embedded with the men of Second Platoon, Battle Company, Second Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team of the US Army. About 20 soldiers were stationed there at any given time. Sometimes Junger and Tim were there together, sometimes separately.
At the time, the very fact of embedding journalists and photographers was being questioned. While the earliest war photographers were more or less required to embed alongside combatants they were documenting, this had changed during Vietnam, resulting in a far more critical view of military action. But the remoteness of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan meant being embedded was the only way for a photojournalist to cover these conflicts with any degree of safety. (Those who chose to venture out alone, known as “unilaterals,” were shunned, even endangered, by the Western authorities.) Naturally, governments felt they would have more control over reporters who were dependent on them for almost everything. This fuelled justified concerns that photojournalists and reporters would be participating in propaganda.
But Tim saw being embedded as an opportunity to make photographs that would get him closer than ever to his subjects. “I think in my work I seek to be ‘embedded’ in any situation,” he said in 2008. Over the course of two years in Afghanistan, Tim produced an incredible amount of work, including one of — perhaps the — most nuanced and intriguing studies of men at war ever made.
“Sleeping Soldiers” is a set of portraits of platoon members taken as they lay resting. “You never see them like this,” Tim later told Junger. “They always look so tough, but when they’re asleep they look like little boys. They look the way their mothers probably remember them.” The Imperial War Museum is presenting “Sleeping Soldiers” as Tim envisioned: a three-screen projection with sound and video. The work has rarely been presented in public this way and is reason alone to visit the exhibition.
“Sleeping Soldiers” makes up a significant portion of Tim’s 2010 book Infidel, which also includes detailed testimony from several of the men. The book is designed like a journal, with rounded corners and a faux-leather shell. It feels more like an artefact, something unearthed from the aftermath of a battle, than a glossy photobook. It is also, of all the work he made in Afghanistan, the project that investigates most deeply the idea of what it means to be a man. “Defining your masculinity is part of the process [of war],” Tim told Mayes in 2010. “You go to the front to prove yourself and you’ll be rewarded. The same is true of photographers.”
Infidel includes the image that won Tim World Press Photo of the year, widely considered the highest honour in photojournalism, in 2008. It is a staggering depiction of the horror of war: Specialist Brandon Olson falls back on to an embankment in the Restrepo outpost at the end of the day. Shell-shocked and exhausted, one hand rests against his head, covering one eye, as the other grips his helmet. It’s dark and out of focus, yet that lack of sharpness lends the image a strange timelessness. It could be a bunker from the first world war, the second world war, Vietnam or Korea. But it’s Afghanistan in 2007, in what was then the deadliest place on earth.
For some critics, the aesthetics of the image were regressive. Its timelessness could be seen as an homage to an earlier era, to a less evolved understanding of what was by then more likely to be called “conflict photography”. But for Tim, each project he worked on had its own logic, its own visual language, and this was the style and syntax he was using to tell a specific, contemporary story, even if the visual language felt familiar. The absence of any real Afghan presence also came in for criticism, despite the fact that this absence was reflective of the soldiers’ experience.
When Infidel was published, Host Gallery in London put on a show largely made up of poster prints of Tim’s works. The gallery was designed to recreate the look and feel of the Restrepo outpost itself. I helped to hang the show and remember the anxiety of having just one shot to get the posters perfectly straight and wrinkle-free on the wall. Mess it up and they went in the bin. This set-up was no gimmick. It was all part of Tim’s desire to create something immersive and transportative, to bring viewers closer to where he’d been.
Restrepo is a dizzying depiction of the naivety, bravado, adrenalin, exhaustion, fear and boredom that soldiers endure over the course of their deployment. At the time it came out, in 2010, Restrepo was everything the Hollywoodisation of America’s war on terror — in blockbuster fiction films like 2008’s The Hurt Locker — wasn’t. It was modest, nuanced, unsentimental.
One of the things that makes Restrepo so compelling is its depiction of the tedium of war. As Tim put it, war is “boredom punctuated by sheer terror”. His allegiance was to the soldiers’ experience, not to the viewer’s expectations of what war should be. At the Restrepo outpost, there was no running water, no hot food, no electricity, no TV, no internet, no sports, no women. “At times there was a lot of combat and at times there was almost none,” Junger wrote in the introduction to Infidel. “The problem with the quiet stretches was that the men never got to release the tension that built up from maintaining a constant state of readiness, and they prayed for contact like farmers pray for rain.”
Enemy contact wasn’t what Tim was looking for by then. He had already become disillusioned with traditional conflict reporting. He was less interested in war itself than in people and what happens to them in a time of war. “I started to get quite bored by the fighting,” he told an interviewer in 2008. “I was thinking . . . I’ve shot that. And then it’s like, well what am I doing here? What is this really about? And it’s about this relationship with these soldiers. These soldiers have now allowed me to get so close to them that it becomes about: can I start to make portraits that really reflect the subtleties and complexities of their own characters?”
His work became a kind of psychological portraiture. In it, brotherhood, masculinity and men’s attraction to violence are not abstract tropes. They are visible. It was as true of the rebels in Liberia as it was of American servicemen in Afghanistan. “The subject that I’m really interested in is young men and violence,” Tim told World Press Photo after winning in 2008. “The progression of my work is increasingly presenting a more domestic and a more intimate portrait . . . The politics are so diverse that we can’t be linked by that, but we can be linked by intimacy. We can be linked by feeling.”
Intimacy and feeling. The words encapsulate Tim’s approach to image making. He was a humanitarian, with a deep reservoir of curiosity and compassion. He had a rare gift for making people, whether an Afghan villager or a London cabbie, trust him and open up to him. And his skill as a documentarian was in communicating that closeness to his audience.
In 2011, Tim was on the red carpet with Junger at the Oscars, where Restrepo had been nominated for best documentary, when he got word of uprisings taking place across the Arab world. Junger later recalled that Tim knew, right then, that he would head to the region. He would go from Oscar nominee to combat casualty in the space of six weeks.
The uprisings that came to be known as the Arab Spring were, in some respects, the opposite of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This time, the floodgates opened to reporters, filmmakers and photographers of all kinds, who found themselves able to document history without having to be embedded. To some extent, this has always been the case with popular uprisings, which better lend themselves to grassroots documentation. But the advent of social media and the proliferation of camera phones supercharged things. The region became a magnet for documentarians, many of whom had little experience working in conflict zones. Hundreds of journalists were injured and kidnapped; many were killed.
It was an unnerving time for professionals like me, too. As an editor at Panos during that period, there was only so much assistance I could offer to photographers once they were in the field. Those who didn’t have an assignment in place were in even more precarious positions. They needed their own training, insurance and vital equipment. In the April 2011 attack that killed Tim and AP photographer Chris Hondros, a young Panos photographer named Guy Martin was seriously wounded. Ten months later in Homs, Syria, Panos photographer William Daniels was staying in the same house as journalist Marie Colvin when it was targeted by government forces, killing her and photographer Remi Ochlik. Daniels, writer Edith Bouvier and cameraman Paul Conroy were stuck in Homs for nine days before safe passage out could be arranged.
In my professional career, I have never experienced anything as bad as those years. In the moment, there’s little time for reflection, for asking whether it’s all worth it. Your energy and attention are elsewhere. But exhibitions such as Tim’s at the Imperial War Museum offer us the luxury of questioning the purpose of it all. Maybe they obligate us to.
The final section of the Imperial War Museum’s show is dedicated to Tim’s incomplete work from Libya. It’s impossible to know for sure what he had in mind. But looking at the images, some of which are being shown for the first time, there are some striking differences to what came before. He used a flash to light many of these portraits, a set-up he likened in his diaries to wedding photography. The images are bright, colourful, optimistic even.
What links them to Tim’s work from Liberia and Afghanistan, besides the obvious, is a heightened interest in masculinity. Mayes told me that in Libya, Tim “was really beginning to feel around this notion of performance, this notion of performing gender in conflict. He saw it very much as older men instrumentalising younger men, which was the phrase he used . . . And therefore, a lot of the young men — the fighters — were performing. They were performing the wishes of the older men.”
He was wrestling not only with his own interests and ideas, but with the notion of what his profession was meant to do. In a diary entry from Libya dated April 10 2011, shortly before his death, Tim wrote: “I woke up . . . with my head swimming with images and ideas from today, and about the tension between truth and beauty.” Photographers, he continued, were trained to believe that “a moment that isn’t composed beautifully” is less “worthwhile”. And yet “honesty” too is important. “I photographed men making victory signs over the charred remains of bodies from an air strike against Gaddafi forces,” he wrote. “The smell from their charred bodies stuck in my nose so much that I found it hard to get [it] off me for some time. I thought those pictures somehow more important than the other more aesthetically composed ones I was making . . . Somehow, they were more honest.”
He noted that after the 9/11 attacks in the US, photographs that weren’t — or looked like they weren’t — taken by professionals were more meaningful to a greater number of people. He may have been thinking of images like the “Falling Man” or the snapshots of American soldiers torturing prisoners in Abu Ghraib. “These ordinary and honest photos, made without any thought for aesthetics, are somehow more important than the reams of carefully composed pictures made by professionals,” he wrote.
When I think about Tim’s death, what pains me is how much has happened in the world since 2011, and how he would have had something important to say about it. All the unmade work. How would he have responded to the failed promises of the Arab Spring? To Afghanistan, Ukraine, Gaza? To social media, AI and fakes? We can’t know, and that lack is a great sadness.
In 2013, Junger made Which Way is the Front Line From Here?, a film tribute to Tim. The first (and only) time I watched it, seeing friends and colleagues lionising him made me feel uncomfortable. Hearing people gushing over him, placing him in the centre of the story, felt wrong somehow. That isn’t a criticism of Junger, or anyone else involved. He made it for himself, as a tribute to his friend and so that people who never knew Tim might learn about him. Like all memorials, it is something for the living, not for the dead.
The year after Tim’s death, I was invited to speak on his behalf at an exhibition of his work at the Nobel Peace Centre in Oslo, which recreated the Host Gallery exhibition from 2010. It was an honour to be there, to represent Tim and Panos. But being asked to talk about a colleague and friend, to describe what he was like, left me feeling hollow. No matter how true the clichés are, they still end up sounding empty. Which is why this Imperial War Museum show is so important. It presents his work and his voice as unfiltered as is possible.
Has anyone made work as important, as impactful, as Tim’s since his death? There has been no let-up in global conflicts over the past 13 years, but the way they are documented has changed dramatically. The social media that was barely nascent at the beginning of the Arab Spring has morphed into something so prodigious that conflicts such as the one in Gaza now generate an unending, frequently unverifiable, torrent of images and videos. After previewing the show, I tried to ask myself why we haven’t seen the equivalent of that Nick Ut or Eddie Adams image from, say, Ukraine, that could change people’s thinking towards the war. All I could conclude was that perhaps it’s not that the image hasn’t been taken, but that we’ve taken too many.
I don’t know what Tim would have to say about the present moment, about how stories are created and consumed, but I have a feeling that this would be at the forefront of his mind. The new exhibition feels important to those of us who cared about him and care about his work. He was one of those rare voices that helped us understand the chaos we lived through. Hopefully, it will introduce his photographs and films to new audiences. Or as Mayes told me, “What we’re witnessing is Tim moving from memory to history.”
Josh Lustig is the deputy photography editor of FT Weekend Magazine. “Storyteller: Photography by Tim Hetherington” is at the Imperial War Museum, London SE1, April 20 — September 29
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